The Philippine government and the local Red Cross branch rowed in public yesterday after Islamic militants failed to release one of three aid workers held hostage as they earlier promised.
Swiss Andreas Notter, Italian Eugenio Vagni and Filipina Mary Jean Lacaba were abducted on the southern island of Jolo on Jan. 15 while on a humanitarian mission.
Abu Sayyaf gunmen had said they would free one of the three International Committee of the Red Cross workers if government forces surrounding their Jolo hideout retreated.
However no one has been released and the government admitted on Saturday that hopes were fading that the Abu Sayyaf would deliver on their pledge.
“I shall hold the president and [her] minions responsible if any one of our three colleagues have been killed in any irresponsible attempt to rescue them,” Philippine National Red Cross chairman Richard Gordon, who is also a senator, said in a statement.
He alleged that the military ignored his request to reposition their forces so the hostage handover could took place.
Gordon also claimed his intervention averted a threat to behead the hostages after the military launched a rescue attempt last week that left three marines and two kidnappers dead and 19 soldiers wounded.
Philippine President Gloria Arroyo’s spokesman Cerge Remonde said the government respected Gordon’s admission that he had been betrayed by the kidnappers.
“That’s why in cases like these it’s better to leave it to government policy, which is leaving this matter to the local crisis committee and with the full support of the [military] and the [police],” Remonde told reporters.
Gordon said that he was “compelled to intervene because the lives of our colleagues [had] been put in clear and present danger when the military troops irresponsibly attacked their captors’ lair. In fact, we were able to stop their executions.”
The Abu Sayyaf is the smallest but most radical of several Islamic militant groups in the southern Philippines.
Set up with funds from the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, it has been accused of the worst terror attacks in the Philippines, including a February 2004 ferry bombing in Manila which claimed more than 100 lives.
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
RSS