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The recent abductions of three Westerners and a Filipino woman from a southern Philippine resort are the latest reminder of the long-running security problems that have hounded a region with bountiful resources and promises, but hamstrung by stark poverty and an array of insurgents and outlaws.
While authorities have not identified the abductors with certainty, there is one usual suspect: the Abu Sayyaf group, a brutal Al Qaeda-linked organisation that has pulled off mass kidnappings for ransom in the last 15 years in the south and in neighboring Malaysia.
"The primary suspect is ASG," regional military commander Lt-Gen. Aurelio Baladad told reporters on Thursday. He added, however, that there have been no conclusive findings on the kidnappers' identities.
Under cover of darkness, at least 11 men armed with two rifles and pistols barged into the Holiday Ocean View Samal Resort on southern Samal Island shortly before midnight on Sunday and then headed toward yachts docked at a marina, according to the military and police.
In less than 20 minutes, the kidnappers herded at gunpoint Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad, the resort's marina manager, and Filipino Teresita Flor, to two motor boats.
An American and his Japanese female companion fought back and were injured, but escaped by jumping off their yacht, said Senior Superintendent Samuel Gadingan, the police chief of Davao del Norte province, where Samal is located, about 1,000km from the capital, Manila.
Aside from the Abu Sayyaf, investigators have considered the possible involvement of a small extortion gang of former rebels. Communist guerrillas have an active presence in the vast Davao region but they have in the past publicly declared their abductions, mostly of government troops, within days of seizing them, making them the unlikely suspects, according to Gadingan.
It remains uncertain which group is behind the latest abduction, but the conditions that foster such crimes are much clearer: a volatile mix of poverty, weak law enforcement and access to thousands of unlicensed firearms in the south, said Julkipli Wadi, dean of the Institute for Islamic Studies at the state-run University of the Philippines.
It's very likely too that those deep-seated social ills would not be solved anytime soon and kidnappings will continue, he said.
"These are generational problems that are difficult to be solved by presidents who are restricted to six-year terms and often lack political will," Wadi said.
Steven Rood, an American whose nongovernmental group helps foster peace talks with Muslim rebels, said it's crucial for the government to dismantle armed groups maintained by powerful families that abound in the south. That, he said, would motivate a larger Muslim rebel group which recently signed an autonomy deal with the government to relinquish their weapons and broaden the prospects of peace in the south.
Kidnappings for ransom have preceded the Abu Sayyaf. But the group started an alarming trend of large-scale abductions after it emerged in the early 2000 as an offshoot of the decades-long separatist rebellion by minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation's south. - AP
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