Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Philippines says tribal gunmen free 12 hostages (AFP)

MANILA (AFP) – Filipino tribal gunmen on weekday liberated 12 hostages after the assemble of teachers and a enrollee endured a four-day ordeal in a remote jungle area, the polity said.

Negotiators destined the near-illiterate gunmen from the forest-dwelling Manobo folk to permit the assemble go in mercantilism for clean treatment of a relative jailed for kidnap, Interior Minister Jesse Robredo said.

"As of 6:00 am (2200 time Tuesday) I was conversant by the personnel that the hostages are on their artefact downbound from the mountain. It appears that every of them were unharmed," Robredo said in a nationwide broadcasting broadcast.

Security forces are to start a manhunt after the liberated hostages accomplish the country of the town of La Prosperidad, which haw verify individual hours, Robredo said.

Five Manobo gunmen seized 15 teachers and children on the largely lawless gray island of island on Sat in a effort to get the polity to liberated Ondo Perez, a jailed relative.

Perez is in slammer and awaiting effort for remove as substantially as for seizure a assemble of 79 people, including teachers and schoolchildren, in La Prosperidad in 2009.

The gunmen, who personnel said did not understand Filipino jural processes, liberated three of the hostages on Sun and Monday and after received assurances from the polity that Perez would be proven fairly.

"That was the exclusive abstract we could offer," Robredo said Wednesday. "They did not obligation ransom and hour was offered."

At the aforementioned time, the gunmen were prefabricated to understand in no doubtful terms that the polity would ingest obligate if the hostages were not liberated soon, Robredo said.

"President (Benigno) Aquino had standing orders to be enduring in negotiations, but he was very concern in locution that destined things cannot be negotiated," Robredo added.

"They (the kidnappers) module be prefabricated to account for what they did."

Resource-rich but necessitous island makes up roughly the gray ordinal of the Philippines. politico and Islamic insurgencies have claimed thousands of lives on the island over recent decades.

Robredo said the kidnappers were past members of local obligate forces numbering individual thousands that were presented guns to help indorse remote communities in island and elsewhere from guerrilla attacks.

"After they were distributed from the (government-backed obligate force), their guns were not recovered and that is why they are armed," he said.

He said he had ordered the personnel forces, which come under his direct supervision, to verify steps to disarm past militiamen so they could not ingest government-issue weapons to commit crime.

Senior members of a Mindanao-based Islamic clan and nearly 200 members of their government-armed obligate obligate are on effort for the November 2009 abductions and murders of 57 people including semipolitical rivals and journalists.


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