Kidnappers free Misamis vice mayor after 17 hours

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY — Kidnappers freed the vice mayor of Jasaan, Misamis Oriental yesterday afternoon, 17 hours after at least seven armed men seized him from his farmhouse in Claveria town.

Chief Superintendent Rodolfo Caisip, Misamis Oriental police director, said Vice Mayor Juan Ascuna Po, 72, who owns a 35-hectare sugar plantation, was abandoned by his captors at 1 p.m. in Barangay Panampuan.

Caisip believes that Po’s kidnappers had felt the pressure from pursuing elements of the Claveria police and the Army’s 9th Infantry Battalion.

Authorities said lumads (uplanders), headed by a certain Fernando Acosta alias Datu Macabali, were behind the abduction.

The highlanders, they said, resented the control of Chinese-Filipino traders of agribusinesses in Claveria.

Acosta’s group swooped down on Po’s farmhouse in Barangay Gumaod at about 8 p.m. Sunday, and disarmed his security guards.

They fled with Po and his driver, a certain Danilo, aboard his service vehicle to Barangay Luna, also in Claveria. They later dumped Danilo who, in turn, immediately alerted authorities about the abduction.

Caisip said Acosta instructed Po’s driver to deliver a letter to a local radio station. In the letter, Acosta lashed back at Chinese-Filipino families who, he claimed, have been grabbing hectares of land from the lumads. — Ben Serrano, Lino de la Cruz and Christina Mendez