|
Militants behead Philippine teacher
THE severed head of a school principal who was abducted by Islamic militants in the troubled southern Philippines was dumped at a petrol station, authorities said.The head of Gabriel Canizares was found inside a bag at a petrol station on Jolo island at dawn, 22 days after the 36-year-old primary school headmaster was kidnapped, local police chief inspector Usman Pingay said. His body remains missing, police said. Authorities had previously said militants from the Abu Sayyaf group, listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation, snatched Canizares from among a busload of teachers near the Jolo town of Patikul on October 18. The Abu Sayyaf demanded a two-million-peso ($A45,000) ransom, which his relatives refused to pay. "We shall make them pay for the enormity of this savagery," President Gloria Arroyo's spokeswoman Lorelei Fajardo said in a statement. She said Arroyo had ordered "punitive action" to "put an end to the Abu Sayyaf group's heinous and inhumane atrocities." "The people of Jolo are condemning this dastardly act," Jolo municipal mayor Hussin Amin said in a television interview aired in Manila. The beheading came three days before a visit to Manila by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which the Philippines said security issues would be a key topic. The Abu Sayyaf has been blamed for many of the country's worst terrorist attacks, including the firebombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that claimed more than 100 lives in 2005, and the abduction of American tourists in 2001. One of the Americans was beheaded while another was killed in a military rescue. The Abu Sayyaf mostly operates out of Jolo, a hotbed of a decades-old Muslim separatist insurgency, where small numbers of US military advisers are providing training to Filipino counter-terrorism forces. Manila said ahead of the Clinton visit on Thursday that it would welcome any help to persuade Muslim separatists to sign a peace treaty to end four decades of low-level rebellion in the Mindanao region. "We would welcome Clinton as a representative of our oldest and staunchest friend, the United States. We expect the talks between the two sides to be fruitful and productive," Arroyo spokesman Gary Olivar said.
Posted by: Oztralian 2009-11-09 |
|
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=282896 |