Just minutes after Elizabeth Smart, 14, was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night, a police car idled by along a neighbourhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint.

A federal jury in the US has convicted a former street preacher of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart more than eight years ago.

Kidnapped teenager Elizabeth Smart, trapped in the hills above her anguished family’s home for the first two months of her disappearance, may have been kept from escaping or crying out for help by the growing influence of her captors, police said.

A 15-YEAR-OLD girl kidnapped at gunpoint from her bedroom nine months ago has been dramatically reunited with her parents in Utah.