A school official who was among three people held hostage by suspected Islamist militants in a lawless region of the Philippines has been released unharmed, a local official said yesterday.
The circumstances surrounding the release of Orlando Fajardo, the vice president of a college who was abducted at his home in southern Basilan island two weeks ago were unclear, with the country’s largest Muslim separatist guerrilla group claiming credit.
Al-Rasheed Sakalahul, vice-governor of Basilan Province, told reporters he personally picked up the former hostage at a mountainous area late on Christmas Eve.
“It’s a good Christmas present. We have now in our possession Doctor Fajardo,” Sakalahul said.
Three other people, including two employees of a lumber yard are still held hostage in Basilan by suspected Abu Sayyaf militants, who had beheaded another hostage earlier this month.
Fajardo’s kidnappers had initially sought 20 million pesos (US$430,000) in exchange for his liberty, but Sakalahul later said no ransom was paid and that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) helped him convince the gunmen to free him.
“The MILF secured the release of Mr Fajardo and handed him over to me. There was no ransom paid and the release was made possible through the help of the MILF,” he said.
Eid Kabalu, spokesman for the separatist group that is holding peace talks with the Philippine government, said: “We have been helping the government secure the release of kidnap victims through the ad-hoc joint action group.”
The liaison group is a mechanism set up after a 2004 truce under which the MILF committed to help the government stamp out terrorism and crime in areas the insurgents controlled.
Basilan gunmen are still holding lumber firm workers Michael Tan and Oscar Lu who were both kidnapped last month, and another local, Donald John Capili, who was abducted in October.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS