Col. Alexander Aleo, commander of the 103rd Army Brigade, said troops from the 55th Infantry Battalion rescued brothers Danny and Latip Kasim from their Abu Sayyaf captors at around 7:30 a.m. in Sitio Maligue in Barangay Matarling, 20 kilometers east of the Basilan capital of Isabela City.
Aleo said the government troops spotted the two hostages with the Abu Sayyaf rebels, who were led by Kalaw Jaljalis.
Jaljalis supposedly singled out the brothers, who are in their early 20s, from a crowd of farmers at a coconut processing plant in Upper Kapayawan and accused them of being military informants, Aleo said.
Jaljalis demanded from the Kasim family P50,000 in ransom to be delivered by 4 p.m. of Monday for their release.
"The Abu Sayyaf rebels were forced to release the hostages after sensing the advancing troops. They escaped and avoided the troops in a frontal encounter," Aleo said.
The brothers’ wives went to the police on Monday, before a deadline set by the gunmen to raise the ransom expired.
Aleo denied the two farmers were military informants. He dispatched soldiers who continued to pursue the bandits after rescuing the two farmers.
Abu Sayyaf guerrillas frequently kidnap farmers to sow terror among Basilan residents or divert pursuing military units, Aleo said.
Last June, about 50 Abu Sayyaf terrorists attacked the Golden Harvest rubber plantation in Barangay Tairan in Lantawan town to divert military forces that were then pursuing another Abu Sayyaf band that had just successfully kidnapped 21 people from a resort in Palawan.
The bandits seized 15 farmers and their families, two of them aged 12, and razed a chapel and another building inside the 300-hectare plantation reportedly owned by former Basilan Gov. Louie Alano.
While many of the farmers were able to escape as the bandits fled pursuing government forces, a number were also beheaded to slow down the pursuing troopers.
The raid was conducted by an Abu Sayyaf faction that came from nearby Sulu, supposedly under Ghalib Andang, in order to divert bandits, led by Khaddafi Janjalani and Aldam Tilao, who raided the Dos Palmas beach resort in Palawan a week earlier.
The military had said the bandits attacked the Lantawan plantation to allow Janjalani’s group to slip out of Basilan and jump off to fortified lairs on Sulu island.
At least six battalions of soldiers were then pursuing Janjalani’s group with nine hostages from Palawan, including American missionary couple Martin and Gracia Burnham, and four hospital workers from Lamitan town, including nurse Ediborah Yap.
Yap and the Burnhams are the only hostages still in Abu Sayyaf hands.