ZAMBOANGA CITY, 27 June 2004 — Troops killed the leader of an Abu Sayyaf gang, tagged as the mastermind in the kidnapping of two Malaysian sailors and an Indonesian tugboat skipper, in a clash Friday in the remote southern province of Tawi-Tawi, a navy commander said.
Captain Feliciano Angue said his men clashed with Abu Sayyaf forces in remote Languyan town where the kidnappers were believed to be holding Malaysians Toh Chiu Tong, 48, and Wong Siu Ung, 52, and Indonesian J.E. Walter Sampel, 53, — crew of the tugboat Ocean 2 who were kidnapped off Tawi-Tawi on April 11 while enroute to Solomon islands to deliver a shipment of pebbles.
“The fighting was fierce and three Abu Sayyaf terrorists were killed, including their leader commander Ayub Bakil,” Angue told the Arab News late Friday. He said villagers positively identified Bakil.
He said villagers tipped off the military about the presence of Bakil in the town. “A team of navy SEALs was dispatched to check on the reports and they ran into the group of Bakil and a firefight ensued,” Angue said.
Angue said the gunmen were probably visiting some relatives in Languyan. There were no reports about the hostages, he said. “We are still tracking down the hostages and civilians are also helping by providing us information about the kidnappers,” he said in a phone patch interview from Tawi-Tawi.
He did not say if there were military casualties, but troops had recovered Bakil’s weapons, mostly automatic and assault rifles. “Operations against the kidnappers are ongoing and we will not stop until the hostages are recovered safely and the lawless elements neutralized,” he said.
Angue said his group is closely coordinating with Malaysia’s Fifth Brigade commander Gen. Mohd Shahrin, who is based in Sabah. “We are working closely with our Malaysian counter-part to prevent kidnappers or terrorists from entering our own borders,” he said.
Unconfirmed reports in Tawi-Tawi said one of the hostages had died from an unknown illness in the hinterlands and that the rest were infected with malaria.
Fighting also erupted in the village of Mag-Saggad in Panglima Sugala town in Tawi-Tawi early this month after Abu Sayyaf gunmen attacked navy soldiers who were tracking down the kidnappers, the military said.
It said troops killed one of the attacker and captured a second gunman and recovered weapons left behind by gang in a house owned by a village chieftain
The kidnappers had freed last month three Indonesians and a Filipino resort worker they kidnapped in October in the Borneo Eco-Farm resort in Sabah’s Lahad Datu district after a private Malaysian negotiator Henry Chan allgedly paid huge ransom money to the Abu Sayyaf.
The money was supposedly to buy the freedom of the two Malaysians, but the kidnappers instead freed the four workers.
A military intelligence report said negotiations are going on between the kidnappers and a group of Malaysian traders who were seeking the freedom of the remaining hostages. One of the negotiator was previously involved in the Sipadan hostage crisis and had been spotted in Manila, the report said.
It did not identify the negotiators, but several Malaysian traders, among them Yusuf Hamdan, helped seek the release of the 21 mostly Asian and European holiday-makers taken by the Abu Sayyaf from the Sipadan island resort in Sabah in 2000.
Most of the Sipadan hostages were freed after Libyan and Malaysian negotiators paid some $15 million ransom. The rebels used the money to purchase weapons and finance their violent activities in the southern Philippines, the military had said.
The Abu Sayyaf originally was fighting for an
Islamic state, but resorted to banditry and terrorism after Janjalani was killed in a police shoot-out in Basilan island in 1998. His younger brother, Khadaffy Janjalani, who was a former government spy, took over as the new leader of the group.
But Janjalani’s death fragmented the Abu Sayyaf into several smaller groups and most of its members have engaged in kidnappings-for-ransom activities in the south, while others have either joined or forged alliances with the country’s largest separatist rebel group the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Abu Sufia, a terror group based in central Mindanao, and the Pentagon kidnap gang, according to the military.
The United States has included the Abu Sayyaf in its list of foreign terrorist organization, along side with the Al-Qaeda network and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiya after it implicated the group to he kidnapping and killing of two US hostages Guillermo Sobero and Martin Burnham in 2001.
