Suspected Islamic militants yesterday seized an Italian priest at gunpoint in the trouble-torn southern Philippines, police officials and a senior church leader said.
Giancarlo Bossi, 57, was grabbed by up to 10 men near the coastal village of Bulawan in Zamboanga Sibugay Province after celebrating a mass or shortly before, police said in a report.
Police regional chief director Jaime Caringal said Bossi was then taken to a waiting boat, which sped towards a Muslim-populated area of the predominantly Catholic country.
renegade
Police identified the leader of the gunmen as Aka Kedie, a renegade leader associated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which has been fighting for an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines since 1978.
The MILF denied it had played any part in the priest's kidnapping, but said it was prepared to help the government secure his release.
Bossi has been employed as a Christian missionary in the area for the past 10 years for the Rome-based Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), said his superior, Father Gianni Sandalo.
"We are awaiting the reports concerning his abduction," Sandalo told the Zamboanga-based Mindanao Examiner, a weekly newspaper.
"Father Bossi is a good man and there is no reason to hold him against his will," he said in an appeal to the abductors of the priest.
manhunt
In October 2001, renegade MILF members seized another priest from his home. Military and police mounted a huge manhunt, but he escaped on his own some six months later.
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said that the 12,000-strong group is in the final stages of peace talks with Manila and abides by an existing truce.
He condemned Bossi's kidnapping as un-Islamic, adding that Kedie's group has long ceased to obey the MILF command structure.
"That group is not MILF. We express our readiness to extend whatever assistance we can give to the Philippine authorities," Kabalu said.
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