COTABATO CITY , Philippines – The kidnapping here Saturday night of a Chinese businessman was accomplished in just 57 seconds and officials are convinced it could be a “test mission” for the perpetrators, believed to be recruits of an emerging gang that has links with rogue Moro rebels identified with foreign terrorist organizations.
Senior Superintendent Willie Dangane, director of the Cotabato City police, said they are still trying to establish the whereabouts now of Adin Yu and his kidnappers.
Seven pistol-wielding suspects, two of them manning a getaway vehicle, snatched Yu while about to board his car, along with his wife, after coming out of a casino at the plush Estosan Garden Hotel just meters away from the heavily guarded 32-hectare compound of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Responding guards of a bank in the same hotel tried to engage the kidnappers, but failed to prevent them from forcing the 53-year-old victim into a car parked nearby. The getaway vehicle was later found abandoned by civilian volunteers at a residential area about a kilometer away from the scene.
“The kidnapping happened so fast, it was pulled off in just 57 seconds as shown by footage in security cameras around the hotel where the casino is located,” Dangane said.
Responding combatants of the Marine Battalion Landing Team 7 (MBLT-7) immediately set up roadblocks in strategic spots in the city, but failed to intercept the kidnappers.
Marine Lt. Col. Dorotheo Jose Jalandoni, commanding officer of the MBLT-7, said they need public cooperation in tracking down the kidnappers that snatched Yu, whose family owns a pre-World War II hardware store here, a bakery and a restaurant at the ground floor of their four-story commercial building at the city’s main trading hub.
“We now have identities of some people that may have participated in the kidnapping of Mr. Yu, but we can’t reveal them yet for tactical reasons,” Dangane said.
City Administrator Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi, a key member of the city’s multisectoral, inter-agency peace and order council, said they will ask the help of the joint ceasefire committee of the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in locating the whereabouts of the kidnappers that kidnapped Yu.
Guiani-Sayadi, a practicing lawyer, said she and her elder sibling, Cotabato City Mayor Japal Guiani Jr., are surprised that until now not a single Islamic cleric has responded to the city government’s appeal for a religious fatwah (edict) declaring kidnapping as “satanic” and against the teachings of Islam.
“A fatwah can help encourage the Muslim communities to support our anti-kidnapping thrusts in Cotabato City,” Guiani-Sayadi said.
Sources from the intelligence community said there are persistent reports from Muslim informants based in isolated areas in Central Mindanao that there are new groups in the region of “jihadis” training in various activities meant to raise funds for certain purposes.