Kidnapped banking heir, 11, dead in lake

The kidnapped 11-year-old heir to a German private banking dynasty was found dead in a lake yesterday, four days after his family paid a €1m (£630,000) ransom for him to be returned unharmed. Police have arrested a man they believe abducted him.

Jakob von Metzler vanished after getting off a bus yards from his home in the wealthy Frankfurt suburb of Sachsenhausen on Friday. He was returning from school. An hour later his family found a ransom demand note on a path to their home. Police said they handed the cash to the kidnapper on Monday and were given a guarantee that their son would be freed unharmed.

But after a search involving more than 1,000 police with helicopters and tracker dogs, the boy's body was found tied in a bundle in a lake near the city of Hanau, 40 miles east of Frankfurt. Early reports said he appeared to have been killed within hours of the abduction. It was not clear whether he had been sexually abused.

Police have arrested a 27-year-old law student they believe is the sole kidnapper. They said he was already known to them. Earlier, they found what they said was €10,000 in notes in the student's flat. They were assuming the cash was part of the ransom. The student was said to have known the Metzler family and to have been in contact with Jakob several times.

A four-and-a-half day news blackout had been imposed by police in an attempt to guarantee Jakob's safety. The police had allowed the ransom money to be paid. On Monday, after the boy failed to appear, police publicised the kidnapping and launched the search.

Roland Koch, the Prime Minister of Hesse state, said: "It is unbelievable that people can be as cruel as this to a little boy." Harald Weiss-Bollandt, Frankfurt's police chief, said: "We did everything humanly possible to save this boy, but unfortunately we were unsuccessful." He said he had broken the news to the Metzler family. "They took it with remarkable composure," he added.

The Metzler family was too distressed to comment. They have two other children. Friedrich von Metzler, Jakob's father, is chairman of the 300-year-old Metzler private bank, which has been in the family for 11 generations. It has several businesses and private individuals as clients and employs 650 people in Germany, the United States, Ireland and Japan.

Mr Metzler, 59, an art lover, is on the board of several German companies. He helps support museums and universities and recently gave €1.5m to a home for handicapped children.

German bankers were the targets of kidnappings by the extreme-left Red Army Faction in the Seventies. Several were murdered. In 1996, Jan Phillip Remtsma, the heir to a German tobacco fortune, was held for 33 days and released for a record ransom of £10m. The five kidnappers were imprisoned but the bulk of the money was never recovered.