Men threatened to gouge kidnap victim's eyes

A Chinese woman was blindfolded, bound and held captive for hours by kidnappers who threatened to gouge her eyes out, a court has heard.

In the Manukau District Court yesterday, Kelly Zhao recounted how a group of men broke into her Bleakhouse Rd, Howick, home on March 6, last year.

They tied up her elderly parents and demanded $1 million, telling her all they wanted was her family's wealth.

Wanzhe Gui, 31, has pleaded not guilty to one charge of kidnapping and one of aggravated robbery.

Three other men have already been sentenced on the charges.

One, who has been given name suppression, has given evidence against Gui over what the Crown alleges was a plan to make some quick money.

Mrs Zhao told Judge Anna Johns and the jury that she and her husband moved to New Zealand in 2001. Her parents had travelled to New Zealand to visit her family and were staying when the alleged kidnap happened.

Tradesmen and plasterers had been working on the house, Mrs Zhao told Crown prosecutor Steven Haszard.

Her husband had gone to golf, then to a friend's house and Mrs Zhao and her parents went to bed.

"I heard a noise, a very loud noise, then I heard a voice and I recognised my father's voice," Mrs Zhao said.

She walked to her father's bedroom and at first thought people were trying to help him with a heart problem.

"I thought he had had another episode," she said.

Then she saw figures in the room and heard someone saying "don't move, don't move".

"Then I heard them ask us: 'Don't move, don't move - if you move again I will beat you to death'."

She was made to sit on the bed with her parents while their hands and feet were bound and they were blindfolded, gagged and tied together.

"We were told they just came for the money and I asked my father to be silent. I told them there's no safe in the house and they felt cheated and they sweared at me."

They took $2300 from her purse and demanded $1 million, she said.

"I said we don't have that much money."

The men wanted to take her parents and her from the house but she agreed to go with them, leaving her parents behind.

Mrs Zhao, who suffers from a disorder which causes her to lose consciousness when she is stressed, said she must have passed out. When she came to she was in a small stuffy place.

Feeling uncomfortable, she said the men loosened the ties on her wrists and ankles. She described throwing up from fear.

She was eventually made to call her husband and told him not to contact police, she said. She gave the men bank card numbers.

"They said if the pin numbers are not correct we will do something very harsh to you." Then it went silent.

She finally woke, still blindfolded, gagged and tied on the ground in Hill St, Onehunga.

The men had told her they would take her eyeballs out at one point, she told the court, and said she was to wait two days.

She rang her husband with a mobile phone they had left her.