MANILA: Exuberant over their release from their captors, journalist Ces Drilon, cameramen Jimmy Encarnacion and Alex Valderrama are finally home after being hostaged for nine days in Sulu.
Describing their experience as “horrifying,” Drilon said they were tied by their “bandit” captors, allegedly belonging to the Al-Qhadafi faction of Abu Sayyaf, who made them to sleep on hammocks or directly on the ground, and was fed noodles divided among the four of them.
Encarnacion and Valerrama were threatened with beheading and Drilon was slapped on the face when the demanded ransom of P15 million did not come by 12 noon last Tuesday.
The deadline was extended but no ransom was paid to the kidnappers, Drilon told reporters who met her and her TV crew at the domestic airport yesterday.
Drilon apologized to her team and her family for putting them in such “horrifying ordeal.”
She said she failed to consider how her family and her cameramen’s families would feel when she decided to do an exclusive interview with Abu Sayyaf leaders in Sulu, she broke down.
With her face, arms and legs covered with mosquito bites, she said: While we condemn the kidnapping, it also opened our eyes to the conditions and saw why they think that way. There is an environment that makes them like that.”
She was referring to the extreme poverty that most Filipino Muslims have been suffering in Mindanao.
She described how boys as young as 12 and 15 years old would wield M-14s rifles instead of a paper and pencil.
Seeing her four sons and her sick mother, Drilon broke down and hugged them inside her room at Medical City in Pasig.
Valderrama and Encarnacion’s families were also there to meet the two cameramen who visibly lost weight and were still shaken from their ordeal.
They were declared safe and were in high spirits by their attending doctors after undergoing the standard check-ups.
Drilon also apologized to her ABS-CBN office for “disregarding the warnings”.
“My office knew, to a certain extent, what my story was, but I did not heed the warnings,” she said.
