U.S. hotel owner kidnapped in Honduras

Reports from Honduras indicate that a long-time hotel owner from Placencia has been kidnapped and perhaps killed in that Central American country. Tom Giblin, a U.S. citizen who recently sold the Serenity Resort, was snatched from a beach house he was building on the Caribbean coast near Puerto Cortez. According to Honduran authorities, the sixty-four year old Giblin was kidnapped along with his twenty-four year old girlfriend, Leticia Lopez. Lopez allegedly escaped and told police that four masked men with machine guns were holding Giblin and demanding fifty thousand U.S. dollars in ransom. Five men have been detained for questioning, but police believe that Giblin, a retired police lieutenant from Connecticut, may have been killed shortly after his abduction. With its low cost of living, Honduras has become a popular location for North American retirees, but persistent violent crime has caused the U.S. State Department to issue travel warnings for tourists.