Employee of Mindanao bus line under threat abducted in South Cotabato

By Ronron
August 12, 2007

An employee of a bus line in Mindanao that has been under attack by an alleged extortionist group was abducted Saturday night in Koronadal City, South Cotabato, police said.

City police director Supt. Florendo Quidilla, Jr. identified the victim as Jaime Rosios, 44, a mechanic of Yellow Bus Line (YBL), which is based along the General Santos Drive highway of said city.

Quidilla told Manila Shimbun in a phone interview yesterday that Rosios was on his way home to General Santos City, waiting for a bus outside the YBL’s Garage, when abducted by three men at gunpoint at around 7:05 pm.

The incident happened on the same day that YBL resumed its operations, which stopped following the twin explosions last August 4 at its terminal located also along General Santos Drive highway, about a kilometer away from the garage. One person was killed and many others were hurt in that incident, triggered allegedly by the company’s refusal to heed ot extortion demands of a local group.

“He (Rosios) was peeing beside the road when the suspects aboard a Tamaraw FX arrived and took him. The vehicle left towards the direction of General Santos City,” Quidilla said in Filipino.

Rosios was with a co-employee at that time but the latter was spared from the abduction. Another fellow employee some seven meters away saw the incident, said Quidilla.

Asked for the motive of the incident, Quidilla said: “We are still investigating this case. We don’t want to speculate at this time.”

He said investigators from the city police are now talking to Rosios’ family and co-employees to get some leads.

Quidilla noted that the abductors did not leave any word when they took Rosios and no one has so far owned up to the abduction as of Sunday.

But Quidilla admitted that a few days after the August 4 bombings, the operation’s manager of YBL received a text message from an anonymous sender, posing a threat against the company’s employees.

“This is the first time that the attack was actually directed towards an employee of YBL. But the company is not just facing problems about the bombings because there is also labor unrest within,” Quidilla said.

He said he still have to talk with the operations manager about the likelihood that the text message has something to do with Saturday’s incident.

Asked about the security of the YBL units that are now plying its routes in Mindanao, Quidilla said: “We have in place some security measures like inspection by our policemen and their guards at the terminals and bus-stops. We also have three checkpoints along the Koronadal City – Tacurong City route.”

Admitting that no policemen were assigned to marshal the bus units during their travel, Quidilla said they have asked instead the bus drivers not to pick up passengers at areas not designated as bus stops or terminals.

“We have told the management that to contain the threat against them, it requires shared responsibility. There should be participation also by the management and the employees,” Quidilla said.

On July 7, a YBL unit was bombed at its terminal, which, fortunately, left no one hurt.

The second bombing of a YBL unit happened 11 days later at the public bus terminal of Tacurong City in Sultan Kudarat province, leaving two persons slightly injured.

Police has identified the extortion group allegedly behind the blasts as the Al-Khobar gang./DMS