Phillippines, December 11: Tense negotiations are taking place after tribal gunmen raided a school and abducted 75 people in the southern Philippines.
The mass kidnapping continued a terrifying outburst of crime in the Mindanao region in recent weeks, following the beheading of a logging company employee and a political massacre that left 57 people dead.
The incidents have highlighted political instability in the Philippines, where President Gloria Arroyo, a US ally, is due to step down next year after two terms in office.
Fifteen armed members of the Manobo tribe descended on the New Maasim Elementary School in Agusan del Sur province as children were attending a morning flag ceremony, the provincial police said in a statement.
Residents of nearby homes were also abducted, including a worker on a government project and two logging company employees, the statement said.
Two school teachers escaped as the hostages were marched to a forest, it added.
Negotiators led by a female social worker followed the group on Thursday and got the gunmen to free all 17 students and the school principal, the statement said.
Police said this left 55 people, all adults, in captivity.
The exhausted children arrived with the principal at the Prosperidad town hall by mid-afternoon and were served meals after their eight-hour ordeal, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
Authorities said negotiations for the others still in captivity were expected to resume today.
Police said the kidnappers were led by Ondo Perez, a local tribal leader, who had issued a raft of demands including the arrest of a local rival whom he accused of being behind the murders of another member of the Perez family.
The kidnappers also wanted food, clothing, medicine, blankets and drinking water, police said.
Local police said some of the kidnap suspects were facing criminal charges in local courts, including murder, and had demanded those charges be dropped.
“They have many cases (against them), from murder to robbery,” Prosperidad police chief Marco Archinue told AFP.
“They want the government to lift all arrest warrants against them. Police have been looking for them for a long time. We were supposed to serve warrants today, that’s why they kidnapped those people.”
Police said the negotiations were complicated by the fact that many of the hostages belonged to the rival Tubay family, which had engaged in bloody clashes with the Perez clan for the past few years.
The Mindanao region is an extremely volatile part of the Southeast Asian archipelago and makes up the southern third of the country.
Aside from the Islamist militants, communist fighters and Muslim rebels fighting for an independent homeland have waged an insurgency in Mindanao since the 1970s that has claimed more than 150,000 lives, according to the military.
—Agencies