About 100 doctors marched to the city center after they learned that Dr. Rosemarie Agustin had been kidnapped.
Abdullah Dumama, Cotabato City health officer, said government and private doctors and nurses would only treat emergency cases during the five-day strike unless the kidnappers freed Agustin.
Maj. Gen. Roy Kyamko, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Battalion, told reporters the Pentagon gangmen snatched Agustin outside her home on Gutierrez street here at around 10:35 p.m. last Tuesday and took her in a boat up a river toward the Lugyasan marsh, where they ran into a miltary checkpoint in nearby Datu Sinsuat town.
Kyamko said two kidnappers were killed and another was captured in the resulting encounter in Tawiran River in Datu Sinsuat, and that the other gangmen slipped away with Agustin in tow.
Troops later found Agustin’s car abandoned along the bank of a tributary of the Rio Grande de Mindanao, not far away from Notre Dame University, he added
Kyamko said the wounded kidnapper, Zainudin Akmad, tried to escape but was cornered by responding troops and policemen three hours later in a nearby barangay.
Akmad is now confined under heavy guard at the dispensary of the Army’s 6th Infantry Battalion at Camp Siongco, he added.
Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema said soldiers and policemen under him clashed with armed men who had been waiting for a watercraft from Cotabato City.
The gunmen opened fire at the troops and policemen after they demanded that the armed men identify themselves and allow the government men to bodily search them, he added.
Sema said he believes Agustin and her kidnappers are still at the boundary of Cotabato City and Datu Sinsuat town but that forces of the Moro National Liberat4ion Front and Moro Islamic Liberation Front are preventing them from moving.
Sema said Ghadzali Jaafar, MILF vice chairman for political affairs, had promised to mobilize their forces in the area to help government troops track down Agustin and her kidnappers.
Led by Tahir Alonto, the Pentagon Gang had been blamed for the recent spate of kidnappings in different parts of Mindanao, including last year’s separate abductions in North Cotabato and Maguindanao of four Chinese and and their Filipino-Chinese interpreter.
Chinese Zhang Zhung Quiang and Xue Xhing were killed by their captors during an encounter with troops in Columbio, Sultan Kudarat on Aug. 11 last year.
Two others, Chinese Zhang Zhung Yi and Filipino Edwin Lim, were freed a month later by the kidnappers through the interecession of Sema and Libyan Ambassador Salem Adam. A fourth one, Wang Sheng Li, was able to escape.
The Pentagon Gang is also believed to be behind the the kidnapping on September last year of Italian Catholic priest Guissepi Piarantoni in Dimatiling, Zamboanga del Sur. — With reports from Roel Pareño, Jaime Laude