The Polish man who was accused of kidnapping British glamour model Chloe Ayling and offering her for sale as a sex slave on the dark web was sentenced to nearly 17 years in prison by an Italian court on Monday.

Lukasz Herba, 30, was charged with luring Ms Ayling to a bogus photo shoot in Milan last July, then drugging her, bundling her into a sack and driving her to an isolated farmhouse in the countryside.

The 20-year-old topless model was held for six days at the farmhouse in the northern region of Piedmont, with Herba allegedly demanding €300,000 (£265,000) from her family and former managers for her release.

The Polish national, who was living in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, then apparently took pity on her after learning that she had a young child and took her to the British consulate in Milan, where he released her.

He was promptly arrested and later described by Italian police as a “mythomaniac adventurer”.

The case raised the chilling spectre of a network of international criminals allegedly kidnapping young women for sale to the highest bidder on encrypted websites, with their “owners” then tiring of them and “feeding them to tigers”.

Ms Ayling was not in court – a judge ruled in December that she did not have to give evidence, with her lawyer, Francesco Pesce, saying she did not want to “again see the face of her kidnapper.”