A British model on Monday broke down in tears on TV as she defended herself over doubts about her six-day alleged kidnap ordeal in Italy and why she went shoe-shopping with an ‘armed assassin’.

Chloe Ayling, 20, said she was injected with ketamine after being lured to a fake modelling shoot in Milan before being bundled into the boot of a car and told she was going to be sold as a sex slave, reports the Daily Mail.

The model from Coulsdon, South London, on Saturday told ITV’s This Morning that she blamed her agent for not performing sufficient checks over the shoot, said she was wishing for a ‘non-painful death’ and that doubts over her story were ‘hurtful’.

The model was ‘humiliated’ by her capture and did not make up the story for publicity, her former agent has said.

Phil Green told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he was standing by Chloe Ayling, who Italian police said was snatched by a group calling itself Black Death in Milan last month.

Green, of Supermodel Agency, said he felt responsible ‘in the sense that I didn’t want to send her to the hands of a kidnapper’, but that everything about the shoot ‘checked out’.

She told This Morning: ‘I was in Italy for three weeks before I actually came home to the UK, so what people here didn’t witness was me crying almost every day, me being too paranoid to leave my room, any noises I hear I would freak out, having nightmares - no one here witnessed that.

‘I only started to get more reassured as it came to the end of the three-week period when police were trying to reassure me that they know the truth of the story and I don’t have to be as fearful as I am now when I return to the UK.’

Ayling was freed after six days when a captor took her to the British consulate. She said she was told she would be killed by Black Death if she tried to flee.

On a website, the group purports to sell weapons and drugs, arrange murders and conduct human trafficking. But police say they have not determined whether the organisation is real, and many cyber-experts are sceptical about its claims.

Meanwhile, the chief suspect in the alleged kidnap has said he did not knowingly take part in any crime.

Lukasz Pawel Herba says his involvement stems from wanting to raise money to treat his leukaemia and that he was hired by a group of Romanians to rent properties around Europe to store garments they were selling, according to reports.

He is also said to have told investigators he posed as a photographer and met Ayling. He said he was paid £500,000, found out the Romanians intended to kidnap her, and backed out of the plan.