Tribal gunmen in the southern Philippines yesterday released 47 hostages they had been holding for three days, after authorities agreed not to arrest them and animals were sacrificed.
The ending to the ordeal was a rare piece of good news for the lawless south, following a political massacre last month that left 57 people dead and the beheading of a man last week in an unrelated abduction.
The vice governor of Agusan del Sur, where the mass kidnapping took place, told reporters that government negotiators had signed a deal not to arrest the kidnappers, a key factor in ending the stand-off.
“Yes at last! Yahoo!” Vice Governor Santiago Cane said in a mobile phone text message to the media after he picked up the hostages from the gunmen’s hideout in a cleared patch of jungle on a mountaintop.
The hostages, aged 17 to 62, were driven down the mountain in an army truck to a hospital in Prosperidad, the provincial capital, looking weary.
“Thank you very much, thank you very much,” one of the hostages said in front of reporters before military escorts took him and others away for medical check-ups and a debriefing.
Cane and other government officials had earlier yesterday met kidnap leader Ondo Perez in a restaurant to broker a deal after the hostages had spent three nights sleeping outside at the gunmen’s lair.
In a more bizarre effort to placate the kidnappers, negotiators also brought in tribal leaders to sacrifice animals as part of a ritual demanded by Perez in overnight talks.
One black pig and three chickens were slaughtered, while 10 boiled eggs and 10 bottles of local wine were offered to the gods.
After the ceremony, Cane took Perez to a local restaurant where he met in private with Governor Valentina Plaza and the deal was struck to give the kidnappers immunity from police action.
Meanwhile, scores of suspected Islamic militants knocked down a concrete wall and barged into a jail in Basilan island yesterday, freeing 31 inmates in a nighttime attack that sparked a gunbattle in which two people were killed, officials said.
Vice Governor Al Rasheed Sakalahul said 70 heavily armed men cut through padlocks with boltcutters after using a sledgehammer to destroy the wall at the provincial jail in Isabela city to free several detained Muslim guerrillas. Other inmates also dashed to freedom, he said.
The daring assault sparked a brief clash that killed one attacker and a jail guard. The attackers and prisoners fled in several vehicles toward Basilan’s jungle-covered mountainous heartland, Sakalahul said.
At least 31 inmates escaped, including suspected militants from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a large Muslim rebel group engaged in peace talks with the government, and the smaller but more violent Abu Sayyaf group, which has been linked to al-Qaeda, regional military commander Major General Benjamin Dolorfino said.
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