ZAMBOANGA CITY, 22 November 2003 — Defying tight security, kidnap gangs struck again yesterday, seizing a 10-year-old girl in the national capital and a former government bank official in the southern island of Jolo.

Police said heavily armed men forcibly took Jolina Dy from a car taking her to a school in Manila’s Paco district. The girl’s nanny and driver sustained injuries when they were fired upon as they tried to resist.

The nanny was shot in the back, while the driver was hit in the head. Both are in critical condition in hospital.

In Jolo, police said five gunmen barged into the house of Ramon Inoferio, 43, in the village of Kasulutan and took the victim at gunpoint.

No group has claimed responsibility for the latest kidnapping, but the police suspects the Abu Sayyaf could be behind it.

Inoferio, whose wife works at the Notre Dame University in Jolo, was a former official of the state-run Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP).

On Thursday, troops arrested two men at a military checkpoint in the southern province of Sultan Kudarat after their car yielded the body of a kidnapped ice plant executive.

The two men named Al Amir Samad and Norodin Jama were arrested around 8.30 p.m. Thursday — two hours after they kidnapped Bernardo Diaz — on a highway in Tacurong City, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Daniel Lucero said.

Lucero said the victim, manager of the Albania Ice Plant in Maasim town in Sarangani province, was found dead inside the car. “The poor man was stabbed many times in the different parts of the body,” he told reporters in a briefing.

The three kidnapping cases comes three days after a kidnapped Coca-Cola executive, 32-year-old Betti Chua Sy, was found dead along a coastal highway near Manila.

Six suspects have been arrested in the Sy case, and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has ordered a fierce crackdown on kidnapping-for-ransom syndicates.

According to a Filipino-Chinese community leader, the kidnapping situation in the country is at its worst since the crime became a major peace and order problem in 1993.

Manila Mayor Joselito Atienza and some police officials yesterday said the rise in kidnapping incidents in the national capital may be politically motivated.

“This is a deliberate effort to scandalize the public, and one of the many possible motives is to sow fear,” Atienza said after being told of yesterday’s bloody abduction in Paco.

Officials of the National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force (NAKTAF), now under ex-defense chief Angelo Reyes, also think there’s more to the latest kidnapping than just the money.

Reyes’ top lieutenants are convinced that his political opponents are behind some of the kidnapping cases that have led some politicians to question his ability to serve as the government’s point man against kidnap gangs. “It seems that our boss’ old enemies are working,” an official of the Police Anti-Crime Emergency Response (Pacer) team told the Inquirer yesterday. (Additional input from agencies)

One possible indicator, the official said, was the fact that three persons were abducted in just five days, beginning with the Betti Chua Sy kidnap-slay last Monday.

Since Reyes was tapped to head the NAKTAF on Oct.

28, the task force recorded three kidnap incidents, excluding Sy’s case.

The gangs’ strategy, the official theorized, was to project the image that the government, particularly Reyes and the NAKTAF, was helpless against kidnap-for-ransom syndicates.

“If this situation would continue,” said another police official, “the public would understandably demand Reyes’ resignation and the president might be pressured to give in to the demand.”

The “vicious” attacks on Reyes, a top Philippine National Police official had noted, was triggered by his decision to leave then president Joseph Estrada in the impeachment crisis in 2001.

Reyes was then the Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff.

“They never stopped their demolition job against Reyes since then,” he told the Inquirer, referring to personalities identified with the former president.

Discussions during NAKTAF meetings have included the possibility that the rash of incidents was connected with the coming May elections or another destabilization plot against the Arroyo administration.

But Reyes’ spokesman, Lt. Col.

Danilo Servando, yesterday downplayed these possibilities. “Let’s not speculate at this point,” he told reporters.

“We have to present first the facts so things won’t be messed up.”