Freed
Italian hostage leaves Philippines hospital
2016-04-09 16:15:22.0
ZAMBOANGA, Philippines, April 9, 2016 (AFP) - A retired Italian priest held hostage for six months by suspected Islamic militants left a Philippine hospital Saturday a day after his ordeal ended, looking frail though officials said he was in good health.
2016-04-09 16:15:22.0
ZAMBOANGA, Philippines, April 9, 2016 (AFP) - A retired Italian priest held hostage for six months by suspected Islamic militants left a Philippine hospital Saturday a day after his ordeal ended, looking frail though officials said he was in good health.
His face partly hidden by a red
baseball cap, Rolando Del Torchio stroked his grey beard and waved briefly
before getting into an ambulance that the military said delivered him to a
chartered flight.
The authorities found him late
Friday aboard a ferry docked on the remote island of Jolo, the main stronghold
of the militant Abu Sayyaf group, some 950 kilometres (590 miles) south of
Manila.
"The victim is emaciated. He
has lost a lot of weight compared to what we saw in his old pictures,"
regional military spokesman Major Filemon Tan told reporters.
"He is okay otherwise."
The Italian government chartered the
private plane for the former Catholic missionary, Tan told AFP, but Philippine
officials would not say where he was taken. Calls to the Italian embassy in
Manila went unanswered.
The Abu Sayyaf is a small group of
Islamic militants infamous for kidnapping foreigners and demanding huge
ransoms, as well as for being behind deadly bombings in the mainly Catholic
Asian nation.
Its leaders have in recent years
pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group that controls vast swathes of
Iraq and Syria.
Armed men posing as diners snatched
the then 56-year-old Italian at his pizza restaurant in the southern city of
Dipolog in October last year.
Tan said he did not know if any
ransom was paid to win the Italian's release.
Del Torchio had worked as a
missionary for the international organisation PIME in the south from 1998
before retiring in 2000 to set up his restaurant, colleagues told AFP shortly
after he was abducted.
There are still 18 foreign hostages
being held in the country -- 10 Indonesians, four Malaysians, two Canadians, a
Norwegian and a Dutchman -- most of them thought to be held by the Abu Sayyaf.
The Abu Sayyaf last month posted a
video of two Canadians, a Norwegian and a Filipina they kidnapped in September
last year and set an April 8 deadline for ransom to be paid or the foreigners
would be killed. The deadline passed Friday with no word on their fates.
The group beheaded a Malaysian
hostage last year.
The Abu Sayyaf was established in
the early 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
It was a radical offshoot of a
Muslim separatist insurgency in the southern Philippines that has claimed more
than 100,000 lives since the 1970s.
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