The release of 12-year-old Marvin Jay Corvera encouraged
officials to continue negotiating with five Manobo tribesmen for the freedom of
the captives snatched at gunpoint Friday and taken to a hilly forest in
Prosperidad town in southeastern Agusan del Sur province.
Most of the captives are grade school teachers, but one
still being held is a sick 10-year-old girl.
Army and police special forces have been deployed in case
the talks collapse.
After a father of one of the hostage-takers delivered food,
water and medicine, the gunmen allowed the man to bring Marvin with him to
officials overseeing the hostage crisis. The child was unharmed but was
starving and appeared stunned from three days of captivity, police Senior
Superintendent Nestor Fajura said.
“This is very positive, very encouraging,” Fajura told The
Associated Press by telephone from Prosperidad, about 830 kmeters southeast of
Manila.
“Even if there’s just a thread of hope, we’ll go for
negotiations and not a tactical operation,” he said.
Army and police sharpshooters and a special rescue
contingent have been deployed in unspecified areas and could spring into action
anytime needed, officials said.
“We are ready there,” military chief of staff Gen.
Eduardo Oban told reporters in Manila. “But we hope that we
can resolve it very, very peacefully.” The gunmen sent two hostages to town to
get food and water Sunday, threatening to harm the rest of the captives if the
men did not return. Authorities, however, did not allow the two men to return
for their safety and decided to ask relatives of the hostage-takers to deliver
the food, water and medicine for a 10-year-old girl stricken with fever.
Fajura said he talked to the girl, Rein Fe Cabantac, by cell
phone late Sunday and was told the gunmen were treating her well. “I’m OK, they
covered me with blanket because it’s cold and I have fever,” he quoted the
child as saying.
It is the latest hostage crisis to grip the Philippines in
recent years. A hostage-taking of a busload of Hong Kong tourists in Manila
last August ended in disaster with the death of eight of the captives, angering
China. The kidnapper — a dismissed policeman who wanted his job back — was shot
to death by police commandos.
The Agusan hostage-takers have demanded the release of
tribal leader Jobert “Ondo” Perez, who was jailed with three other tribesmen
for taking 79 people hostage in 2009 over a long-running clan feud. Officials
have told the gunmen a local court was handling the case and promised to take
steps to try to speed up its resolution.
Clan feuds, fueled by weak law enforcement in remote regions
awash with illegal firearms, have often erupted into deadly clashes,
kidnappings and hostage-takings in the southern Philippines. The violence
underscores the complexity of security problems in the south, where troops have
been battling Muslim and communist insurgents, along with Al-Qaeda-linked
militants, for years.
