Phillipines, December 13: Gunmen holding dozens of people in a Philippine jungle have agreed to surrender after the state said it would consider at least some of their demands, the government says.
Hostage negotiators plan to escort the kidnappers down from their mountain hideout on Sunday morning, when the group also plan to hand over their captives, the crisis team’s spokesman Alfredo Plaza said today.
“The group of (Ondo) Perez will surrender. We will fetch them at 7am tomorrow (10am AEDT on Sunday),” Plaza told reporters after a series of meetings between government, military and police officials.
The government had earlier reviewed the kidnappers’ demands in a bid to bring a peaceful resolution to the siege, now in its third day.
The gunmen, former guerrillas and members of the mountain-dwelling Manobo tribe, raided a school in a small farming village in the Agusan valley region of the southern island of Mindanao on Thursday and took 75 hostages.
Twenty-eight, including 18 children, were later freed.
About 400 soldiers and police were deployed amid concern that the kidnappers would harm the hostages, who have been forced to sleep on the ground, according to government officials who visited the area.
The negotiations centre around an inter-tribal conflict between two rival leaders, Plaza said.
As part of the deal, the government held talks with a Manobo tribal leader called Calpito Icuag, considered a senior member of a rival Manobo family of ex-communist guerrillas who have been involved in a bloody war with the kidnappers.
Perez, the kidnap gang’s leader, has demanded that criminal charges against him be dropped, that Icuag’s bodyguards be disarmed and that Joel Tubay, the leader of the kidnappers’ rivals, be arrested.
It was unclear if the latter two demands would be granted.
Both Perez and Tubay have outstanding arrest warrants for murder over killings which have their roots in a long-standing dispute over property, Plaza said.
However the hostage crisis council, made up of local government, military and police officials, is keen for the clan war to be settled by the Manobo tribe instead of involving the courts, Plaza said.
He said this was allowed under a law that recognises dispute settlement customs observed by cultural minorities.
The kidnappers, as well as Tubay’s group, were former New People’s Army (NPA) members, Plaza said.
Security sources said there were 19 kidnappers armed with assault rifles who had 47 captives, including two women, in and around a hut in a clearing of a thickly forested mountain.
They said that while the gunmen had not received formal combat training, they would not hesitate to kill the hostages.
The kidnapping was part of a wave of violence that has swept the southern Philippines, where Muslim and communist insurgents mix with warring clans, pirates and corrupt officials.
Islamist militants on the southern island of Basilan are holding three hostages after beheading another captive on Wednesday.
President Gloria Arroyo lifted martial law over Maguindanao province on Saturday, ending eight days of emergency rule triggered by the massacre last month of 57 people, allegedly by the heads of a Muslim clan that had ruled the area since 2001.
—Agencies