ROME, 20 July 2007 — A Roman Catholic priest kidnapped in the southern Philippines last month has been freed, Italian Premier Romano Prodi said yesterday.
The Rev. Giancarlo Bossi, a 57-year-old missionary from Milan, was on his way to a police station in the Philippines, Prodi announced to reporters outside his office last night.
“Father Giancarlo Bossi has been freed; a car is taking him toward a Philippine police station; I’m truly emotional, happy,” Prodi said. “Today is his mother’s birthday, so it was also a very lucky coincidence.”
Bossi’s sister, Pinuccia Bossi, told Sky TG24 that she had just spoken to her brother. “He’s good and he’s coming home,” she said.
Pope Benedict XVI said last week that he was praying daily for Bossi.
The release came as a surprise since officials in Italy and the Philippines had said as recently as last week that they did not even know who was behind the kidnapping. There was not even a hint from Philippine officials of Bossi’s fate yesterday.
Bossi, a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), was taken at gunpoint on June 10 near his church in the coastal town of Payao, Zamboanga Sibugay province, after holding mass with his congregation.
Philippine authorities have tagged the gang of Akiddin Abdusallam, described as a “rogue leader” of the MILF, as the group that kidnapped Bossi, the third PIME member to be abducted in the southern Philippines in the last nine years.
Immediately after the abduction, Philippine government forces teamed up with the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in searching for the priest. But after weeks without any positive result, Prodi sent lawmaker Margherita Boniver as her special envoy to the Philippines to work for Bossi’s freedom.
Soon enough, gunmen made contact with PIME officials by sending pictures taken of the priest in captivity.
Rescuers Attacked
On July 10, a convoy of Marines searching for Bossi in the southern island of Basilan were attacked by MILF fighters allegedly aided by “lawless elements.”
Of 14 soldiers killed in nine hours of fighting in the town of Al-Barka, ten were beheaded. The military have blamed the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group but the MILF claimed only their fighters were involved.
MILF leaders, however, said the decapitations could not have been done by their fighters as the group forbids such barbaric act for being “un-Islamic.”
Sattar Alih, head of the MILF cease-fire monitoring team in Basilan, said their fighters withdrew from the battle scene, leaving the bodies of soldiers behind, after military and rebels agreed to a truce.
Military intelligence sources in Basilan have implicated unnamed politicians who allegedly supplied the militant Abu Sayyaf and with mortar rockets, weapons and munitions during the fighting.
Their private armies also fought against the military forces side-by-side with the MILF and that two gunmen had died in the skirmishes.
Both the MILF and police are investigating.
The mayor of Al-Barka, in an interview with local reporters, earlier said the people who decapitated the fallen soldiers may have been angered by the murder of an imam in the village of Ginanta hours before the ambush took place.
The military has denied responsibility for the imam’s death.
On Wednesday, the military said another imam in the town of Lamitan, who had served as a government informer against the Abu Sayyaf, was murdered and his body chopped to pieces.
Commanders Replaced
As a result of the ambush, the military yesterday sacked two Marine commanders, causing dismay among other soldiers involved in the gunbattle.
Navy spokesman Cmdr. Giovanni Carlo Bacordo said the two — Lt. Col. Felix Almadrones, commander of the Marine Battalion Landing Team 8 and operations officer Maj. Nestor Marcelino — will also face an investigation over the fighting.
“They have been relieved because of command responsibility and in order for them to shed light in the ongoing investigation,” Bacordo said.
Bacordo said Lt. Col. Elmer Estilles replaced Almadrones and that Maj. Adolfo Avarate was named new operations chief of the local Marine force.
The MILF, which is negotiating peace with Manila, said the soldiers entered a rebel stronghold without coordination, sparking day-long clashes, a charge strongly denied by the island’s military chief, Marines Col. Ramiro Alivio. (Additional input by Al Jacinto from Zamboanga City, southern Philippines)
