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Southeast Asia
Abu Sayyaf jail break attempt in the Philippines
2005-03-14
Up to six people have been killed in a bloody escape attempt by Muslim militants linked to Al-Qaeda at a maximum security prison in the Philippines capital, police said. Gunfire rang out at the Camp Bagong Diwa prison in the early morning as police special weapons and tactics units surrounded one building in the compound where an estimated 10 armed Abu Sayyaf prisoners were holed up on the second floor. Negotiations were ongoing at 11.15am local time (0315 GMT) as police snipers took up positions around the building while the shooting subsided. The inmates had overpowered their guards and grabbed three guns as the guards conducted a daily headcount of the 435 prisoners including 129 Abu Sayyaf members, said Superintendent Agerino Cruz, the Manila police spokesman. Police sources put the death toll at six including four Abu Sayyaf inmates and two prison guards. The sources said a prisoner and a jail guard were wounded.

An AFP photographer at the scene saw two casualties, both wearing the uniforms of prison guards, being dragged out of the building by colleagues and loaded onto ambulances. National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Leopoldo Bataoil told reporters those involved in the escape attempt are believed led by Alhamser Limbong and Tahir Abdul Gafar. Both are on trial for the kidnapping of a group of tourists including three Americans in the western Philippines in 2001. Several of the captives, including two Americans, were killed and beheaded in the year-long hostage drama that ended with the rescue of the third American, Christian missionary Gracia Burnham.

Since then the Abu Sayyaf group, set up in the 1990s allegedly with money from Al-Qaeda, has made it to the US State Department's "foreign terrorist organization" blacklist. The gunmen are "hardened criminals, terrorists," national police chief Arturo Lomibao told reporters outside the prison gates. "We are not going to think twice if necessary to launch the final option," he said, referring to a prison assault.
Then why are you standing there talking to reporters? Shouldn't you be planning?
On the upper floors of the prison, some of the inmates, many of them naked from the waist up, peered out from behind bars. In late morning, Parouk Hussin, the governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, a Muslim self-rule area in the south, and Mujib Hataman, a legislator from the area, entered the prison compound to help the prison authorities negotiate with the gunmen. The prison holds many of the top detained leaders of the Abu Sayyaf as well as some of the suspects in the worst terrorist attacks in the Philippines, Bataoil said.
This would be an excellent excuse for "unfortunate" accidents to occur to said terrorists; fog of war and all that.
They include the suspects in the 2000 bombing of a Manila overhead rail system that claimed more than 20 lives and the firebombing of a ferry on Manila Bay last year that left more than 100 people dead, he told reporters. The shooting was the latest in a series of jailbreak attempts involving detained Muslim militants in the Philippines. About 11 months ago eight escapees were killed after at least 53 prisoners including about 20 Abu Sayyaf suspects broke out of a jail on the Abu Sayyaf stronghold of Basilan island in the south.
Posted by:seafarious

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