More soldiers fielded amid kidnapping threats

COTABATO CITY, Philippines – The Army’s 6th Infantry Division has fielded more soldiers in strategic spots here amid mounting threats of more kidnapping of local businessmen by Moro rebels in surrounding towns.

Text messages have been circulating here for two days now that the group that pulled off the Feb. 18 abduction in a busy area here of Chinese trader Wilson Tan and his 10-year-old daughter will again snatch “three wealthy residents,” one of them a prominent personality in the academe.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Ponce, 6th ID’s civil-military relations chief, said their commander, Gen. Fred Cayton, has also ordered the deployment of more than 50 plainclothes agents around the city to help the police detect possible intrusions by kidnappers from outside.

Ponce said Cayton has been closely coordinating the 6th ID’s anti-kidnapping security measures with Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema and the local police.

Sema, chairman of the Moro National Liberation Front, yesterday told Catholic station dxMS here that MNLF members in the city and the neighboring provinces of Maguindanao and North Cotabato are now helping monitor certain individuals implicated in previous kidnapping in Central Mindanao.

Sema said grinding poverty and underdevelopment in Mindanao’s far-flung communities are among the reasons why unemployed people resort to kidnapping as a source of money.

Businessmen in the city and surrounding towns are so apprehensive now of their security.

“We can’t help but worry because there were dozens of us who were kidnapped in the early 1990s,” a Chinese hardware store owner told The Star.

The source was apparently referring to the kidnapping pulled off then by a group led by Commander Mubarak, whose real name was Abogadu Gaduh, and, subsequently, those perpetrated by his successors, Mayangkang Saguile, Musa Ali and Tahir Alonto, who was to become the chieftain of the Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang.

Mubarak was killed by combatants of the Philippine Marine Corps in a raid at his hideout in Pantukan, Davao del Norte in 1993, while Musa Ali, said to have masterminded the kidnapping here of more than 20 people, was gunned down by suspected military intelligence agents near the supermarket here in 1999.

Ghadzali Jaafar, vice chairman for political affairs of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, said their central leadership has also been helping the mayor here address kidnapping threats.

Members of the Chinese community said the Tans were freed by their captors, allegedly led by Commander Nasrodin, in exchange for a “hefty ransom.”