Crime for the day

Add international manhunt, an FBI SWAT team and extradition to the already Hollywood-like details of the case of the fake Australian "collar bomb." The FBI has arrested a man in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky who they say is responsible for chaining a fake bomb to an Australian teen's neck earlier this month as part of a plot to extort money from her wealthy parents. The suspect, Paul "Doug" Peters, is an Australian citizen who has lived in the U.S., including Kentucky, in the past. The fifty-year-old father of three will be extradited back to Australia, where he faces charges including kidnapping and breaking and entering. The extradition process will take about two months, officials say.

Peters's capture at the hands of a SWAT team is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre case that began nearly two weeks ago in a wealthy suburb of Sydney. Police say that Peters broke into the home of William Pulver, the CEO of an Australian tech company, and attached a fake bomb to the neck of Pulver's eighteen-year-old daughter, Madeleine. It took a bomb squad ten hours to free Madeleine from the device, and only later did police determine that it did not actually contain explosives.

Police have declined to speak publicly about a cryptic note that was reportedly attached to the girl along with fake bomb. "There was a range of pieces of evidence that led us to identify this suspect," Luke Moore of the New South Wales Police said at a news conference at FBI offices in Louisville. Australian police now say that the device attached to the girl did not contain explosives, as they once suspected. But it only gets weirder.

Police say that after attaching the fake bomb to the 1eighteen-year-old girl's neck, the intruder left a cryptic clue pinned to her neck that appears to be related to a 1960s action novel. The note contained no mention of money but did include a list of demands, according to authorities. "I can confirm for you that there was a letter attached to this device, a note attached to this device that did make certain demands," Detective Superintendent Luke Moore said. "We are treating this as an attempted extortion, a very serious attempted extortion. That letter obviously gives us some lines of inquiry that we are following but I can't go any further into what it contains unfortunately."

The note was signed "Dirk Struan", the name of the central character in James Clavell's novel Tai-Pan:

The intruder appears to identify himself with the protagonist from Clavell's 1966 novel, which is set following the British seizure of Hong Kong in 1842 and is the second novel, after Shogun, in the author's Asian saga series. Senior police officers, including Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch, said they had never encountered a collar bomb or such an unusual extortion attempt in their long careers.

The incident has captured international media attention and led to plenty of speculation about who was behind it and why. Local officials say they are aggressively pursuing the leads that come in and appear to have publicly ruled out the speculation that somehow the girl, Madeleine Pulver, and her friends were behind it. "Madeleine is the victim of this offence," Moore said.

Local police have given somewhat conflicting reports to the AP and to Australian media about the exact nature of the device, which was described as "very elaborate and sophisticated". The AP reports that a police spokesman refused to say whether it was tethered to the eighteen-year-old's body, saying only that she had  "been kept in a very uncomfortable position" throughout the lengthy ordeal. Police have confirmed that the device was indeed attached to the girl somehow. "I've been doing this job for a long time and this is certainly up there in terms of being unusual and difficult to deal with," New South Wales state Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch told the paper. "I've never heard of anything like this in Australia before." An earlier report said that a senior police officer had described the device as an unusual "collar" bomb, and that it was part of an extortion attempt. The Australian notes that the home where the incident took place is "one of Sydney's richest addresses."