My Kidnap Terror by Lena Zavaroni

Summary based on the original article published on 6 August 1981.

Seventeen-year-old Lena Zavaroni has revealed that, at age eleven while recording in Johannesburg, she was ambushed on the street by two masked men who threw a sack over her head and carried her into a storeroom behind an empty shoe shop. Inside the stifling sack, she panicked as the kidnappers—refusing to explain their motive—demanded a £250 ransom, claiming it was a student prank. Her manager paid up, they fled without a trace, and Lena, shaken and in tears, was then protected by a bodyguard for the rest of her stay—and ever since—to make sure it never happens again.