ZAMBOANGA CITY – Abu Sayyaf gunmen have freed an eight-year girl after four months in captivity in the southern Philippine province of Sulu, police said Thursday.
Senior Superintendent Abraham Orbita, Sulu police chief, said the victim, who was kidnapped July 25 in Zamboanga Sibugay’s Olutanga tow, was released in Jolo town on Wednesday afternoon.
Citing a police intelligence report, Orbita told the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner that the girl was handed over to her brother and father, who paid a still undetermined amount of ransom to a woman wearing niqab at the port of Jolo. The negotiation was conducted by the victim’s family.
Orbita said the trio then went to the house of a relative who is a policeman where they briefly stayed before heading to Zamboanga City on ferry.
No other details were made available by the police. The girl, whose family operates a small restaurant in Olutanga town, was reunited with her parents. She was seized by five armed men on July 25 and brought to Sulu where she had been kept since then.
The release of the victim came two weeks after Abu Sayyaf militants freed two German yachters Stefan Viktor Okonek, 71, and Henrike Diesen, 55, in exchange for P250 million ransoms. The duo was heading to Sabah in Malaysia on a private yacht from a holiday in Palawan province when militants who were returning to the southern Philippines from a failed kidnapping in Sabah spotted the Germans and seized them on April 25.
Another Abu Sayyaf faction is also holding a Malaysian fish breeder Chan Sai Chuin, 32, who was kidnapped along with a Filipino worker on June 16 this year from a fish farm in the town of Kunak in Tawau District. The militants are demanding 3 million ringgits (P41 million) for the safe release of the fish breeder. It is also holding captive a Malaysian policeman Kons Zakiah Aleip, 26, who was seized on June 12 also this year following a clash in Sabah that killed another policeman. The militants are demanding 5 million ringgits (P68.3 million).
The militants are still holding hostage a 64-year old Japanese treasure hunter Katayama Mamaito, who was kidnapped from Pangutaran Island in July 2010; and two European wildlife photographers Ewold Horn, 52, from Holland; and Lorenzo Vinciguerre, 47, from Switzerland, who were taken captive in the coastal village of Parangan in Panglima Sugala town in the southern Tawi-Tawi province in 2012. And several Filipinos kidnapped in other provinces and brought to Sulu.
The military said the militants are hiding in civilian communities and have moved their hostages from one hideout to another making it extremely difficult for security forces to track them down. (Mindanao Examiner)
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