By CARLOS H. CONDE
International Herald Tribune/The New York Times
Published: March 31, 2009
MANILA — Officials in the Philippines repeated an appeal Tuesday to the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf not to harm three Red Cross workers it took hostage after a deadline set by the group for beheading one of the captives passed with no sign that the threat had been carried out.
Senator Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine National Red Cross, made an appeal on Tuesday.
Abu Sayyaf head demanded that the military pull its soldiers out of an island province in the south, warning that it would behead one of the three Red Cross workers if the demand were not met by 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Military officials said it was “physically impossible” to remove troops from Sulu island, the group’s base in the southern Philippines, where the Red Cross workers were kidnapped in January.
The deadline passed Tuesday without any report of a beheading. That, however, was small comfort to officials working for the release of the hostages, who knew that Abu Sayyaf was capable of carrying out its threat. They said they had done their best to make sure that the Red Cross workers remained safe, but that they were prepared for the worst.
“If you think killing any of them will stop Red Cross, you are wrong,” a weeping Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, said on national television a few minutes before the 2 p.m. deadline.
Mr. Gordon said he had been on the phone around noon Tuesday with Albadeer Parad, the leader of the Abu Sayyaf group holding the hostages, and had pleaded with him to extend the deadline to at least 6 a.m. on Wednesday, but that Mr. Parad rejected him. Mr. Gordon said he could no longer contact Mr. Parad’s phone as the deadline neared.
Abdusakur Tan, the governor of Sulu province who earlier declared a state of emergency in his province, said the government would certainly respond if the Abu Sayyaf made good on its threat.
“We are not going to take this sitting down,” he said on ABS-CBN television. “We are prepared for the worst.”
Concerns about the fate of the hostages heightened last week after the government launched military offensives in Sulu, enlisting civilian volunteers in an attempt to prevent Abu Sayyaf from slipping through. Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross have appealed to the military not to launch attacks that could harm the hostages, and to Abu Sayyaf to release the hostages.
”Please spare and release Mary Jean, Eugenio and Andreas,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement Monday. “All they were doing was helping people in need in your area. There is no ideology or religious law that could justify killing them.”
Mary Jean Lacaba of the Philippines, Eugenio Vagni of Italy and Andreas Notter of Switzerland were abducted by armed men in Sulu on Jan. 15 after doing humanitarian work inside the provincial jail.
Abu Sayyaf, responsible for many of the deadliest terror attacks in the Philippines, has a grim record of following through on threats to behead its captives. Guillermo Sobero, an American from Corona, California, was decapitated by the group in 2001. Abu Sayyaf guerrillas also beheaded two Filipino teachers in 2000 as a “birthday gift” to President Joseph Estrada.
Dante Jimenez, chairman of the nongovernment Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, said the government must now finish off the Abu Sayyaf “once and for all because they are mocking all of us, they are holding all of us Filipinos hostage.”
