Australia forms task force to probe citizen's kidnap

MANILA, Philippines - Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday said her government has established a task force to investigate reports that an Australian man has been kidnapped in southern Philippines.

The Philippine military said armed men abducted 56-year-old Warren Richard Rodwell in Ipil town in Zamboanga Sibugay late Monday and were heading to the coast, where security forces were trying to rescue him.

Gillard said Australian authorities had yet to confirm that an Australian had been kidnapped.

She said a task force has been set up and that the Australian embassy was working with local authorities to establish the facts.

Such task forces typically include trained hostage negotiators.

Officials said security forces found bloodstains in Rodwell’s coastal home where at least half a dozen suspected Muslim militants barged in and dragged him away.

Police said Rodwell may have been injured when he was seized from his home at Green Meadows Subdivision in the sparsely populated village of Pangi in Ipil town, less than three kilometers from the shore.

“There were some workers doing some paint job in the house, but had already gone when the gunmen arrived,” regional police chief Elpidio de Asis said.

“There was an empty (bullet) shell recovered and some blood. Maybe he struggled and someone fired but we do not know who was hit,” De Asis said.

Military and police forces were searching nearby hills, apparently hoping to prevent the kidnappers from taking Rodwell by boat to neighboring islands where they usually hide and negotiate for ransom.

There is a high possibility that the notorious al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group is behind the abduction, said De Asis.

He said Rodwell was kidnapped in the same Ipil area where the militants snatched a Filipino businesswoman last September and took her by boat to their jungle stronghold on nearby Basilan island. She was wounded in a rescue operation two weeks later.

Desperate for funds, the militants have resorted to kidnappings, targeting people who struggle to pay ransom. Last year, the group carried out at least 11 kidnappings and raised about $704,000 in ransom, according to a confidential government report seen by The Associated Press in February. They killed at least six hostages whose families failed to pay for their release, the report said.

Zamboanga Sibugay was the scene of heavy fighting in October when government troops overran a camp of Muslim rebels and outlaws, sending the main group of the original 100 gunmen fleeing.

The Abu Sayyaf is believed to be holding several other hostages, including an American teenager kidnapped in July. Her Filipino-American mother was released in October.

Police said Rodwell had made several trips to the country over the last two years and was staying in Ipil after getting married in June to his Filipino wife, a 27-year-old single mother whom he met via the Internet.

According to a webpage on Myspace.com, where the man’s photograph matches that of Rodwell as provided by police, Rodwell described himself as “an expatriate English-native-speaker... living in Asia for most of this 21st century.”

He wrote that he had been teaching at a university in China and had written and edited “hardcopy magazines” and traveled throughout the world.

Many foreign governments have warned their citizens to avoid large sections of Mindanao because of the kidnapping threat.

Nine other foreigners have been kidnapped in the south this year.

Four of them – a Chinese fish trader, a Filipino-American teenager, an Indian married to a Filipina and a Malaysian lizard trader – are believed to still be in captivity.

Three South Koreans pursuing mining ventures were also seized in October. Although they were released or rescued after more than a month in captivity, one of them died in a hospital this week from a stomach ulcer that was left untreated while in captivity, police said. – AP, Roel Pareño, Cecille Suerte Felipe