3 telecom engineers freed

ILIGAN CITY — The three telecommunications engineers who were snatched last June 1 in Lanao del Sur were released unharmed by their captors in a coastal village in Cotabato City Saturday night, radio reports said.

The radio reports, however, did not say if the P7-million ransom, as the kidnappers initially demanded, was paid for the safe release of Jennifer Bargarola, Scenio Polistico and Edwin Esguerra.

The three engineers were seized in Tubaran, Lanao del Sur while they were reportedly surveying an area for a cellular site of Globe Telecom which had contracted them.

The military suspects that the notorious Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang was behind the abduction.

But unconfirmed reports claimed the possible hand of a local politician who lost in the recent elections, in the kidnapping.

This, after one of the kidnappers, a certain Tommy, told Divina Suson, a reporter of radio station RMN-dxIC, in a cellular phone interview that he was a henchman of the losing candidate.

"I happen to know Tommy. I befriended him and we exchanged cellphone numbers during the course of my work as a reporter," Suson told The STAR.

Tommy, she said, called her up and informed her about the kidnapping.

Sometime last year, the losing politician’s name cropped up following the release of a kidnapped Chinese-Filipino businessman.

Sources said a courier sent by the trader’s kidnappers ran off with the P3-million "board and lodging fee" paid by the victim’s family.

This reportedly forced the businessman’s family to shell out another P3 million which they gave to another courier sent by the kidnappers. — With Roel Pareño