Embraced by a Disguised Net

Section 9 takes the case after the daughter of former Prime Minister Kanzaki vanishes. Suspicion lands on the figure nicknamed Blindfold Ivan, a cover identity for the North Territories branch of the Russian mob. The pattern is grimly consistent: across roughly three days a string of young women are seized, hauled to butchery workshops, and killed so their organs and cybernetic parts can feed the black market.

Kanzaki had spent months burying reports of the mass disappearances and denying that Blindfold Ivan even existed, hoping to keep relations with Russia warm. With his own daughter now among the missing, Aramaki presses him to go public, and the confession detonates. What had been a quiet investigation becomes a nationwide scandal, and a former Foreign Intelligence Service officer running the operation suddenly finds herself and her captives at the center of a media storm.

Cornered, the officer tries to reach the Russian Embassy for asylum, but the diplomats refuse to shelter her amid the uproar. Her attempt collapses, ending in her arrest and the recovery of the abducted women.

Section 9 links the disappearance of Kanzaki's daughter to the trafficking operation fronted as Blindfold Ivan.

At Aramaki's urging, Kanzaki publicly admits the kidnappings he had long suppressed, reversing his diplomatic cover-up.

The ex-Foreign Intelligence Service officer behind the ring is denied embassy asylum, then captured, freeing the hostages.

The episode is a stand-alone entry in the first Stand Alone Complex season and carries the subtitle CAPTIVATED. Minoru Ohara directed it from a script by Shotaro Suga.

Its Japanese broadcast was February 4, 2003, and the English airing came on March 20, 2005. It follows Assassination Duet and leads into Vanished Medication.