Sayyaf resurrected

Oh well, you didn’t really think calm would last in the strongholds of the Abu Sayyaf, did you? Khadaffy Janjalani slipped out of Basilan before the start of the Balikatan exercises, and it has long been suspected that he had relocated to Sulu.

Now we have reports that Janjalani, brother of Abu Sayyaf founder Abubakar Abdurajak, has teamed up with the Sulu-based group of Radulan Sahiron. And we have Fr. Cirilo Nacorda, parish priest of Lamitan town in Basilan, warning that Abu Sayyaf spokesman Aldam Tilao, better known as Abu Sabaya, has been spotted, very much alive. The military itself, however, has noted that there have been numerous reports of purported sightings of Sabaya since he was shot in an encounter with government troops in the waters off the Zamboanga peninsula last June.

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Perhaps Nacorda is just hallucinating, but decapitations have long been the trademark of Sabaya and Janjalani. Last year their group rounded up nearly a dozen farmers in Lamitan and beheaded the victims a few feet away from a chapel. They decapitated one of their American hostages from Dos Palmas, Guillermo Sobero, as well as two Filipino captives.

Prior to that Janjalani’s thugs also decapitated a priest and lopped off the breasts of Christian teachers they had seized.

Before the Dos Palmas raid, Janjalani’s group rarely asked for ransom. They seemed to prefer sowing terror just for the fun of it. But perhaps they were impressed by the enormous success of the Sulu-based faction’s raid on a Malaysian island resort, which netted Ghalib Andang, a.k.a. Commander Robot, an estimated $20 million in loot. That’s over P1.04 billion at the exchange rate yesterday, when the peso weakened because of the beheadings. Even if Robot had to share his loot with his men and some creeps who facilitated the payments, he would have been left with more than enough to buy his dream orchard.

Who wants to be a billionaire? Surely Sabaya, too, and Janjalani.

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Now the Abu Sayyaf has returned to its original role: harassing Christians for the heck of it. There has been no ransom demand in the latest kidnapping, and even if there is, relatives of the four remaining victims have made it clear they have no money to pay.

Since there are no foreigners involved, I expect the military to launch a major offensive — as soon as the troops can find the kidnappers and their captives. We’ll know soon enough what has happened to those four poor women.

What is uncertain is whether the military can catch Janjalani or even Sahiron. One reason there is such distrust of the military among residents of Basilan and Sulu is that government troops can’t seem to catch any of the Abu Sayyaf’s top commanders. No ransom payment is ever recovered, and there is persistent talk that the bandits share their loot with local government and military officials. Crime pays for the Abu Sayyaf and its coddlers.

If the government can’t catch the leaders, recover the loot, or address poverty and underdevelopment which are the root causes of Islamic unrest in Mindanao, we can expect more Abu Sayyaf attacks. Soon they may even be back in Basilan.

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CRIME STORY, PART II: Interior Secretary Joey Lina rang me up to clarify that Patrol "117" did respond to a taxi driver’s call about the robbery Sunday night at a Jollibee outlet in Pasig. Lina said there were cops at the site within six minutes after the call was received.

The robbers must have moved very quickly since they managed to clean out the Jollibee branch of its earnings for the day as well as divest about 30 customers of their valuables, then flee before the lawmen arrived.

What impressed me more than the purported quick response was how the cops managed to trace the taxi driver’s call and find him last Monday – after some officials received a scolding from chief crimebuster Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Careful with those crank calls to 117.

I told Lina the driver might flee to the boondocks after being hounded by cops. I also feared that the driver might suffer the fate of Landbank cashier Acsa Ramirez. But Lina promised that the driver would in fact receive a certificate of appreciation from the Philippine National Police.

And that’s what happened to the taxi driver yesterday. He reportedly received a plaque and cash reward from no less than the President herself. But he was not included in a photo op to protect him from the robbery gang members.

Senior Superintendent Filipino Amoguis, executive director of Patrol 117, also wrote me about the details of their response to the cabbie’s call. In the letter Amoguis admitted: "We recognize the need to further improve our services to better serve our clientele, the citizenry."

One of our staffers told me he once chanced upon a carjacking and called 117, and was also told there were no cops available, and would he please just call the regular police station? But that was a year ago. I’ve since received similar reports from other people.

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In fairness to the cops, some of our staffers have started asking other taxi drivers about any experience they might have had with 117. One cabbie said yesterday that he got quick responses twice – and in both cases he received certificates of appreciation from the PNP.

As Amoguis himself acknowledged, however, the service still leaves much to be desired. It’s good to hear that the President is breathing down the necks of the 117 personnel. There should be no let-up in the presidential pressure, since this police hotline is crucial in her campaign against crime.

The President should also not immediately swallow everything fed her by her law enforcement officers. When she’s fuming, their first instinct is to save their necks by giving rosy, inaccurate reports or presenting fall guys as suspects.

She may also want to give her cops better equipment, starting with basic items that won’t cost a fortune, such as hand-held radios, which are useful in chasing suspects. I’ve often seen drivers – especially of big vehicles such as trucks and buses – violating traffic rules, then ignoring traffic cops who try to pull them over. Drivers won’t be so brazen if they know other cops would be waiting for them elsewhere, alerted on radio by the cops they have ignored.

The people want this anti-crime campaign to succeed. But there are so many things that need fixing in the PNP, and problems that won’t be solved or papered over by yet another photo op.