Police deny reported release of ex-soldier's son in NCotabato

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines – Police on Monday clarified that the 19-year-old son of a retired soldier snatched in Midsayap town by bandits on Saturday night remains in captivity and has not been rescued.

Superintendent Reynante delos Santos, chief of the Midsayap municipal police, said the family of Mark Anthony Baya has not even received any message or ransom demand yet from his abductors, an indication that they are still on the run.

“There is no truth to reports by certain media entities that the victim had been rescued. What we have recovered was the getaway vehicle of the kidnappers, not the victim,” Delos Santos told reporters.

Col. Dickson Hermoso, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, also denied that Baya had been rescued.

Local officials are convinced that the abduction of Baya in Barangay Tumbras in Midsayap is a diversionary attack by the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) to ease the plight of its forces being chased since Saturday morning by soldiers in North Cotabato’s adjoining Aleosan and Pikit towns.

Soldiers have killed four bandits -- initially identified as Sanday, Dimasangkay, Kused and Zainal -- and wounded seven others in the “calibrated police action” against BIFF forces that tried to get near a portion of the Cotabato-Davao Highway that connects Aleosan and Pikit.

Four gunmen barged into the store owned by Baya’s parents, forced him to a Grey Mitsubishi Lancer car, and spirited him to another village also in Midsayap, near a river where a motorized watercraft was waiting.

Responding policemen and soldiers found the abandoned getaway car of the kidnappers, which barangay officials immediately turned over to the municipal police office after having been cleared by an Army bomb disposal team of booby traps.

Delos Santos said that according to witnesses, they overheard the fleeing kidnappers talk, in the local Maguindanaon dialect, about turning over Baya to another group of BIFF bandits waiting at the swampy border of Midsayap and Datu Piang, Maguindanao.

Before Baya was taken by the bandits, a series of encounters erupted at the border of barangays Pagangan and Nalaapaan, in Pikit and North Cotabato, respectively, between BIFF bandits and combatants of the Army’s 40th Infantry Battalion.

The hostilities were preceded by the bandits’ harassment of an Army detachment in Barangay Tubak in Aleosan Friday night, which sent hundreds of villagers fleeing for their lives.