abducted a 37-year-old man in Winnipeg<\/a>, and the vehicle involved was tracked down in Alexandra, Minn. \u2014 about 460 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg.<\/p>\nThe victim was able to break free in Alexandria, running into a nearby store before local police arrested another man, the North Dakota Highway Patrol said previously.<\/p>\n
The 37-year-old man “eventually conceded” that the kidnapping report was not true and that he had falsely reported the crime, Chief Scott Kent of the Alexandria Police Department said in a news release Monday.<\/p>\n
Both of the men knew each other before the kidnapping report was made, Kent said.<\/p>\n
The 37-year-old was arrested for falsely reporting a crime and is being held at the Douglas County Jail before he appears in court, Kent said.<\/p>\n
‘Entire story was fabricated’<\/p>\n
Lt. Jenna Clawson Huibregtse said the North Dakota Highway Patrol received a report of the abduction from Winnipeg police and the family of the alleged victim shortly after 9 a.m.<\/p>\n
North Dakota police initially found the vehicle around Hillsboro, about 180 kilometres south of the U.S.-Manitoba border, after using the man’s phone carrier to ping his location.<\/p>\n
“We only do that if somebody’s life is in danger,” Huibregtse said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Huibregtse said video confirmed the men had entered the U.S. at a border crossing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Officers continued tracking the vehicle and confirmed two men were onboard using licence plate readers and cameras along the highway system.<\/p>\n
Police were about three minutes away from sending an alert to people’s phone about the alleged abduction when the highway patrol was informed the vehicle had crossed the border into Minnesota.<\/p>\n
Other local, state and federal partners \u2014 including the Federal Bureau of Investigation \u2014 joined the investigation, Huibregtse said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It was probably a combination of six to eight\u00a0hours worth of work from many, many agencies, and [it’s] so unfortunate that this entire story was fabricated.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘It’s disappointing’: N.D. highway patrol<\/p>\n
Huibregtse said it is rare to have an abduction in North Dakota, but all reports are taken seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We wouldn’t want somebody to get seriously hurt,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Huibregtse said law enforcement members had to stop the work they were doing on other cases to deal with this weekend’s incident.<\/p>\n
“It makes you feel like somebody took advantage of the system a little bit for very unknown reasons,” she said. “It’s disappointing.”<\/p>\n
North Dakota won’t be pursuing charges against the 37-year-old, leaving it to Minnesota’s court system to handle the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked if the 37-year-old man would face charges in Canada, a spokesperson for Winnipeg police said the charges will be addressed through the U.S. judicial system.<\/p>\n
Winnipeg police also declined to comment on the relationship of the men and said it won’t release more information about the incident. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-861949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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