MANILA - Film clips of the 24 Filipino seamen who are being held hostage by rebels in Nigeria were shown on CNN recently. The rebels allowed CNN to take photos of the Filipino hostages and their captors.
Even while Philippine officials were trying to negotiate for their release, another Filipino woman was abducted in Nigeria’s oil rich delta region. Late reports said the woman who is married to an Iranian for many years has died after she fell off the kidnapper’s boat. Her name was not released.
Sources in Nigeria say the woman, who is
married with two children, may have drowned falling off the kidnappers’ boat or
jumping overboard when they tried to assault her.
But Philippine Foreign Affairs
Undersecretary Esteban Conejos said he still believed the woman was alive and
that the abduction was likely a criminal rather than a political act by
Nigerian rebels.
He said the Philippine embassy in Nigeria
had “information received from a secondary source" that the woman was dead
but the embassy also warned that this was not yet proven.
“It was mentioned in the report that the
embassy sent with the cautionary note that this is completely
unconfirmed," said Conejos.
The Filipina, who has been living with
her Iranian husband in Nigeria for 17 years, was abducted on Feb. 7 near the
center of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, the center of Nigeria’s oil industry.
Conejos said the kidnappers contacted her
husband later that day and told him they were holding her but made no further
demands. The woman’s identity is not being disclosed at the request of her
family.
In Malaca±ang, President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo's spokesman Ignacio Bunye said the Philippine government
remained hopeful that all abducted Filipinos would be released unharmed.
He also assured the families of the
victims that diplomatic personnel were on the ground and doing their best to
resolve the crisis.
“President Arroyo is monitoring
developments closely and the DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) is now
verifying the veracity of the latest abduction," Bunye said Friday.
The Philippine embassy in Nigeria has
been in daily touch with authorities trying to free dozens of foreigners
kidnapped over recent weeks, including 26 Filipinos.
Conejos said he believed the woman’s
abduction was a “police case,” unlike the abduction of 24 Filipino seamen last
month and a Filipino engineer on Tuesday in the Niger Delta.
He said that unlike those cases, the
woman was not abducted in the hinterlands or at sea and the victim was not
involved in the oil industry which the Nigerian rebels were targetting.
He also said the government saw no need
to repatriate the estimated 3,900 Filipinos in Nigeria — most of them working
in the oil industry.
A
ban on the deployment of more Filipinos to Nigeria, imposed after the abduction
of the seamen, remains in place.
Seven Filipinos were among the 121 people
kidnapped in Nigeria last year, but they were freed unharmed.
Nigeria says the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta — which is campaigning for a more equitable
share of Nigeria’s vast oil earnings — is behind most of the kidnappings.
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