Bolton drug dealer forced captive to 'pretend to be a dog'

Danish Dar, 24, held his victim at prisoner at a flat in Bolton town centre for two weeks, the longest stretch of false imprisonment a senior judge said he had ever heard of.

Bolton Crown Court heard how the victim had been missing from his home for 10 days when he called his father on February 5 last year.

Prosecutor Hannah Forsyth said: “He stated that ‘they’ve taken me and they want money.”

The missing victim made another call on February 7 saying “when I make payment, I will be free.”

The case was heard at Bolton Crown Court (Image: Newsquest)

Another call on February 9 read to the court said: “I’m going mental, they are feeding me noodles, when I am free I am going to the police.”

Dressed in a dark grey t-shirt Dar, of Darwin Street, Halliwell, looked on via video link from prison as Ms Forsyth explained how the plot had come about.

She told the court how the victim had was in £2,000 debt to Dar, who called round to his house only to find that the same man was also in debt to another drug dealer.

The victim managed to pay Dar £1,000 worth of his debt from his benefits and the pair decided that the man would stay at the home of one of Dar’s friends in the town centre.

Their plan was that he would stay there for two months paying former boxer turned drug dealer Dar his benefits until the debt was paid off.

The arrangement was amicable at first until Dar found £300 was missing, which he believed the man he was holding had stolen.

Ms Forsyth said: “He said he was nice to the victim initially but when £300 was missing the situation changed.”

She added: “He would force him to strip and pretend to be a dog.”

Ms Forsyth told the court how Dar filmed the victim as he went through the degrading ritual and had slapped him, kicked him and tied him up with duct tape.

The victim was finally found “in a dishevelled state” and freed after a police raid on February 10 last year.

But the two weeks imprisonment would prove to have a lasting impact on the victim.

Ms Forsyth said: “He had been in the town centre during this incident and could hear the town hall bells.

“When he hears the same bells it reminds him of this incident and triggers his PTSD.”  

That same day, police raided Dar’s family home where they found him in an upstairs room with £190 in cash, three knives, snap bags, a Nokia mobile phone and a list of names.

Police also found heroin, cocaine, ketamine and MDMA, all of which Ms Forsyth said was “part and parcel” with a drug dealing operation.

Brought before the magistrates court, Dar, who has no previous convictions, pleaded guilty to false imprisonment.

He also confessed to four charges of possession with intent to supply Class A drugs and conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.

Rebecca Caulfield, defending, said that Dar deserved credit for his guilty pleas and told the court of his “difficult” upbringing and fall from grace having once been a promising boxer.

She said that Dar had enjoyed boxing but had become associated with “anti-social groups”, first smoking cannabis, then taking cocaine and building up a drug debt of his own.

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Ms Caulfield said: “He says he himself was forced into dealing Class A drugs as a way of paying off his debt.”

She also pointed out that when holding his victim, the “violence and humiliation” only started relatively late on in the process.

Ms Caulfield said: “Mr Dar says there was a sense of desperation in paying off his own drug debt.”

But Judge Nicholas Clarke KC said that at two weeks the length of time the man was “held captive” was “possibly the longest I’ve ever dealt with".

He ordered that Dar appear before the court again on Monday, March 25 to be sentenced.