Tsinoy businessman, daughter kidnapped by armed men

COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Armed men seized a Chinese-Filipino businessman and his 10-year-old daughter here late Wednesday.

Cotabato police chief Senior Superintendent Willie Dagane said the father and daughter were herded into a van by unidentified armed men and brought to a remote coastal village at the outskirts of the city near Kabuntalan town in Maguindanao.

The businessman was about to enter his residence in a car with his wife and two daughters when four heavily armed men approached, police said.

The men shattered the vehicle’s glass windows with their rifles and then dragged the businessman out.

His wife tried to fight back but was hit on the head with a pistol.

The kidnappers then fled with the father and daughter in a gray Mazda van with license plates MVR-879. They then transferred the two hostages into two waiting motorboats after setting the van on fire, Dangane said.

The gunmen, suspected to be members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), warned they would kill the hostages if the military would not pull back from their hideout, officials said.

Cotabato Mayor Muslimin Sema said the kidnappers allowed the man to call his family to warn the military to stop a planned rescue, apparently realizing that government troops had managed to locate their hideout. Air force helicopters hovered over the area Wednesday, hours after the snatch.

Kidnappings for ransom, fed on huge numbers of unlicensed firearms and poverty, have eased in the city and nearby townships in the 1990s.

More than 50 wealthy Chinese-Filipino merchants were kidnapped by armed men here from 1990 to 1996, held captive in marshlands around Kabuntalan, and set free only after their families paid hefty ransoms.

Sema said this latest kidnapping might have been inspired by a wave of kidnappings in Sulu, Basilan and nearby Zamboanga.

The kidnapping occurred against the backdrop of the military’s strict enforcement of a local gun ban for three weeks.

Officials have confiscated some 200 handguns and assault rifles from private individuals, mostly members of big Moro political clans.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Ponce, civil-military relations chief of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said their units in Maguindanao are now helping locate the whereabouts of the kidnappers and their victims in Kabuntalan, a town that is a known stronghold of the MILF in Central Mindanao.

Ponce said their intelligence units are validating reports fed to them by villagers in Kabuntalan that the kidnappers are Moro rebels implicated in previous high-profile kidnappings in Central Mindanao. – With AP