Kidnapper dead, 3 more nabbed as cops foil abduction in Midsayap

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines --- Lawmen gunned down a kidnapper and arrested three more as they foiled an attempt to snatch at about 6 p.m. Sunday a drugstore owner  in Midsayap town,  the second kidnapping attempt in Central Mindanao in a span of seven days.

Supt. Reinante Delos Santos, chief of the Midsayap municipal police, said the rescued businesswoman, Monalita  Sedenio, 73, was on board a pick-up truck on her way home, along with a driver, when gunmen flagged them down, commandeered their vehicle and sped away.

Policemen, however, blocked the kidnappers’ escape route, sparking a brief encounter, which resulted in the death of one of  the abductors,a certain Jelon Pasandalan, who hailed from nearby Pikit town, also in the first district of North Cotabato.

Two others, Digu Bagkal and Mohammad Pagayao, were later cornered at a nearby village by pursuing policemen and an angry mob of mixed Muslim and Christian villagers.

Bagkal and Pagayao later led policemen and combatants of the Army’s 7th Infantry Battalion to their hideout in an interior barangay in Midsayap, where they nabbed the group’s alleged leader, Adam Guimalon Sansaluna.

Army intelligence sources said Sansaluna, who is of ethnic Maguindanaon descent, is identified with a small group in the province of the Moro National Liberation Front loyal to Nur Misuari.

“We are now trying to determine their real group affiliation,” Delos Santos said, adding that the three cashiered kidnappers had  confessed to being members of an MNLF faction identified with Misuari.

The bungled kidnapping last Sunday in Midsayap was preceded by last week’s prompt rescue by policemen and local officials of a manager of a Manila-based jobs placement firm, Milagros Abu Hussin, who was snatched by four gunmen in Datu Odin Sinsuat town in Maguindanao.

Hussin was on her way to Cotabato City from Sultan Kudarat province, along with prospective applicants for employment in the Middle East, when the gunmen blocked an isolated stretch of the Cotabato-General Santos Highway in Barangay Makir in Datu Odin Sinsuat, ordered her to disembark from the vehicle and forced her into a waiting getaway car.

Responding policemen and armed villagers cornered the kidnappers at another barangay, forcing them to escape and leave a frightened Hussin behind.