“Pizza or your life?” Swedish prisoners take guards hostage and demand 20 pizzas

Yesterday, two Swedish prisoners took two guards hostage for nine hours and demanded a very special kind of ransom. They first demanded a helicopter flight, but then changed their minds and demanded 20 pizzas. After long negotiations and pizza delivery, the hostage-takers let the guards go. The perpetrators have since been arrested.

Photo by Ivan Torres on Unsplash

Yesterday afternoon, two prisoners convicted of murder managed to break into a guard’s room in Sweden’s heavily guarded Hällby prison. It was the start of an extraordinary hostage drama in Eskilstuna, a town west of Stockholm.
The two prisoners barricaded the room and held two guards hostage for nine hours. The police called in a negotiator to end the hostage-taking without injury. The two hostage-takers first demanded a helicopter flight, but several hours later they changed their demand. They asked for 20 pizzas, according to the popular Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

“Yes, the pizzas have been delivered,” says a prison spokesperson, Stina Lyles. A remarkable detail: nobody paid for the pizzas, according to…