Unidentified gunmen have abducted a Norwegian resort manager, two Canadians and a Filipino woman from a southern Philippine island, the military and police said yesterday.
The gunmen appeared to have specifically targeted the victims when they entered the Holiday Ocean View Samal Resort before midnight on Monday on the northern tip of Samal Island off Davao, regional military spokesman Captain Alberto Caber said.
“They appeared to target the foreigners. They went straight for the yachts,” Regional police spokesman Superintendent Antonio Rivera told the Agence France-Presse. “[But] we still don’t have anything. We’re blank. No group has taken responsibility and there is no demand for ransom.”
Photo: AP
He said a Japanese couple from one of the yachts was also nearly abducted, but the pair fought back, while some of the more than two dozen guests at the resort jumped into the water to escape.
He said the Japanese couple suffered minor injuries.
Rivera said 11 gunmen in two motorized outriggers were involved in the abduction.
He said the police and military using planes and helicopters were scouring the waters and the shores around the island and other areas in the Davao Gulf, but they appeared to have escaped.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, who was at the resort last week for a meeting with political allies, was monitoring developments and authorities were doing their best to find the captives, his spokesman told reporters.
“The investigation is in full swing, simultaneous with pursuit operations,” spokesman Herminio Coloma said.
In 2001, Abu Sayyaf militants tried, but failed to seize hostages from the Pearl Farm Beach Resort south of Ocean View amid a ransom-kidnapping spree in the early 2000s in the southern Philippines. Three security men died fighting the attackers.
The Abu Sayyaf, which has about 400 gunmen, was recently declared a terrorist group by a Philippine court and is on Washington’s lists of terror organizations.
Police identified the Norwegian as Kjartan Sekkingstad, 56, the resort’s marina manager, and Canadians as John Ridsel, 68, and Robert Hall, 50.
Rivera said the Filipino woman is a partner of one of the Canadians.
Samal island is famed for powdery white sand beaches and dive spots, with resorts there charging up to US$500 a night. The area is a popular stop for foreign tourists who sail around the nation’s many tropical islands.
Additional reporting by AFP and Reuters
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema