ZAMBOANGA CITY, 9 April 2005 — The largest Muslim separatist group in the Philippines offered yesterday to help security forces hunt renegade members behind a string of kidnappings on the southern island of Mindanao.
Yesterday, a wealthy Chinese trader in Cotabato City, the seat of power of the area’s autonomous government for Muslims, became the fourth person since late 2004 to be held for ransom by a group led by former members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
“We are duty-bound to help recover the kidnap victim because of an agreement we have signed with the Philippine government to go after criminals and kidnappers hiding in our territories,” Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the MILF, said by telephone. “This will also prove we are not behind the kidnappings. We remain committed to the peace talks.”
Col. George Lomboy, a local military commander, said Benny Cota was seized shortly after alighting from his van in front of his shop in Cotabato City, 930 kilometers south of Manila.
Lomboy said witnesses saw the victim fight with his abductors but was overpowered, hogtied and shoved inside his van. The suspects sped off towards an unknown direction.
“Investigators later recovered the van, abandoned in a remote village in the outskirt of Cotabato,” he said.
Lomboy said the suspects were believed to be members of the dreaded Pentagon Gang, a notorious band responsible for the abductions of foreigners and wealthy businessmen in Mindanao.
The MILF is also expected to help in the rescue of another trader who was sized by unidentified gunmen in nearby Marawi.
Jamael Rogong was driving his van on Thursday when armed men flagged down the vehicle and commandeered it, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Buenaventura Pascual.
“The van was abandoned near the village of Barit in Pualas town in Lanao del Sur province. We still don’t know who were behind or the motive of the kidnapping. Authorities are still investigating this case,” Pascual told the Arab News.
He said soldiers and policemen were sent yesterday to track down the kidnappers and their hostage in the province.
No group claimed responsibility for the latest kidnapping, but rogue members of the MILF and the Pentagon Gang are known to operate in the area. Both groups have been linked by the military and police in the series of kidnappings of foreigners and local traders in the southern Philippines.
The MILF’s offer was seen as part of confidence-building moves ahead of Malaysian-hosted talks due to resume on April 16-18. Technical panels from the government of the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines and the MILF rebels are due to discuss ancestral land for Muslims and indigenous people on resource-rich Mindanao.
Agreement on the land issue, one of the most thorny, could lead to formal talks and a peace deal ending three decades of violence that has killed 120,000 people, stunted development in the south and dented investor confidence in the Philippines.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar was due to meet senior MILF leaders next week after a two-day retreat with his counterparts from the other nine members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the central Philippines.
Hamid will also visit 60 monitors from Malaysia, Brunei and Libya overseeing a July 2003 cease-fire agreement with the MILF.
The truce was broken in January when a group of rebels attacked an army outpost, but the monitors prevented the violence from escalating.
