Ronron
October 8, 2007
Suspected members of the New People’s Army (NPA) abducted a village captain, an Army sergeant and a paramilitary personnel on Sunday morning before the actual fight of Filipino boxing champ Manny Pacquiao against Marco Antonio Barrera in the United States started.
The police and military said the incident happened at around 9am in Barangay Kanidkid, Montevista town wherein the suspects, numbering to between 20 and 30, pretended to be military personnel, thus succeeding in their plan.
Col. Benito de Leon, spokesman of the Davao-based 10th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army, said the suspects first went to the house of Barangay Kanidkid chairman Benjamin “Momoy” Mahumas.
The suspects reportedly introduced themselves to Mahumas as members of the Army’s 60th Infantry Battalion and 72nd IB, thus they were accepted by the village captain.
But when they immediately held Mahumas hostage, they ordered the barangay captain to call in the detachment commander of the 72nd IB in said barangay, identified as Sergeant Raul Reyes, and his CAFGU (Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit) personnel, identified as a certain Dodong Villaflor.
De Leon said Reyes and Villaflor were not aware that they were being made to fall into a trap of the suspected rebels. Thus, upon arrival of Mahumas’ residence, the two were immediately taken as hostage as well.
From Mahumas’ residence, de Leon said the three hostages were taken to the Army detachment where the rebels demanded that all firearms be turned over to them.
Seeing their detachment commander under custody of the rebels, the nine remaining personnel at the detachment were forced to hand over 15 assorted short and long firearms to the hostage-takers.
The group then left aboard an Isuzu elf truck and a multicab.
De Leon said pursuit operations were conducted by troops from the 1001st Infantry Brigade, augmented by police forces but remains unsuccessful as of Monday afternoon.
De Leon would not say where the center of the pursuit operations so as not to jeopardize it.
He disclosed that the nine personnel in the detachment have already been relieved and placed on custodial detention at the 72nd IB headquarters as they are undergoing investigation.
“This is a gross violation of the CARHRIHL (Comprehensive Agreement for the Respect of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law). They have been swearing that they will conform to human rights law but they have taken now as hostage a civilian, and they took hostages out of deception, and not in a legitimate encounter,” de Leon said of the incident.
“We condemn this outright disregard for the CARHRIHL,” he added.
Asked if their have been demands from the suspects in exchange for the freedom of their hostages, de Leon said: “There is none. This just has something to do with the series of successes of the military against their movement. We have convinced some of their comrades to surrender, we have seized their camps, we have neutralized some of their comrades. So this is just part of their guerilla tactics.”
The 7,100-strong NPA has been waging guerilla warfare in the countryside in the last 38 years and the government hopes to crush it by 2010 when President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ends her term.
Peace talks with the communist movement bogged down in August 2004 after it was tagged as terrorists by foreign governments./DMS
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