-
Related
Philippine troops shot dead a notorious leader of a gang of kidnappers and rescued a four-year-old girl and her nanny from a week-long captivity, police said.
Two other suspected members of the "Pentagon" gang were captured while one policeman was injured in the gunbattle in Magallanes municipality in Cavite province, 65 km south of the capital Manila, a police announcement said.
President Gloria Macapagal, who has ordered a full-scale war on crime gangs to ease investor concerns about law and security, visited the battle scene after the encounter and congratulated police and soldiers.
Many of the gangs claim religious or ideological justification for their actions, but authorities say most are just after the money.
The kidnap leader, identified by police as Faisal Marohombsar, has been hunted by police since he and two other gang members escaped from a Manila police detention centre in June.
The three were captured in a Manila hotel in February.
The rescued girl was identified by police sources as a niece of a prominent Filipino business executive. The gang had demanded a ransom of 100 million pesos ($4 million) for her and her nanny, sources said.
The girl was on her way to a school when she was abducted along with her nanny on August 19.
The Pentagon gang -- which the United States lists as a foreign terrorist group -- is believed to be composed of renegade members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the biggest Muslim rebel group fighting for an Islamic state in the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines.
Police have blamed the Pentagon gang for the kidnapping of Italian priest Guiseppe Pierantoni, four Chinese engineers and a South Korean trader in separate incidents on the southern island of Mindanao in the past two years.
Most of those hostages were later freed but two of the Chinese kidnapped last year were killed during a rescue operation by government forces.
Two other Philippine armed groups are on the US terror list.
They are the Muslim Abu Sayyaf rebels, which Washington has linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and the communist New People's Army, which has been fighting for a Marxist state for more than 30 years.
U.S.-trained Filipino troops are pursuing an armed group led by a nephew of an Abu Sayyaf commander on the southern island of Jolo to rescue four women members of a local Jehovah's Witnesses group kidnapped last week. Two other Jehovah's Witnesses were beheaded last week.
The Abu Sayyaf and the Pentagon gangs are the most notorious of 21 known kidnap groups operating in the country.
Anti-crime watchdogs say some of the gangs are backed by corrupt police and soldiers, allowing them to strike with virtual impunity and earning for the Philippines the label "Asia's kidnap capital."
© Reuters
