COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Police yesterday arrested two suspects in the kidnapping of a four-year-old son of a Filipino-Chinese trader and found in their hideout combat uniforms with patches of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
Senior Superintendent Willie Dangane, city police chief, said suspects Naresh Maun and Mamarais Tubog, who were tagged by witnesses as among the armed men who snatched the boy here last week, volunteered to identify their leaders and accomplices, in the presence of a lawyer, to lessen their criminal liability.
Maun and Tubog led police to their hideout in a remote district here, where the raiding team, headed by Dangane and Chief Superintendent Felizardo Serapio, found assorted ammunition and military uniforms with MILF patches.
“We are not saying the MILF, as an organization, is involved in the kidnapping of the child. The MILF should initiate its own investigation into why fatigue uniforms with MILF patches were found in the kidnappers’ hideout,” Dangane said.
Dangane said the two suspects identified their leaders as Saudi Kasan and Abdul Mohaimin Abo, reputedly a younger brother of a ranking MILF leader.
Abo was said to have worked as a driver of the city government and later became a disk jockey of a local FM station before he allegedly masterminded the boy’s abduction.
“This Mr. Abo was terminated by the management of that FM station because he used the station as a springboard for commentaries inciting uprising against the government by Mindanao’s Moro people. He was also found to have used the station in extorting money from certain people,” Dangane said.
The boy and a companion were on their way home from school when the kidnappers flagged them down, forced the child into a black Kia car and brought him to the Kakar district here, the gateway to a vast marshland in Kabuntalan, Maguindanao.
Dangane said they also found in the kidnappers’ hideout a checkbook owned by Kasan, the alleged financier of the kidnap gang that snatched the boy.