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By Anthony Vargas, Reporter
THE military has lost contact
with troops tracking an armed band holding an Italian priest
captive, a senior military official said Wednesday.
Army intelligence operatives were
dispatched to Barangay Sapad, Nunungan, Lanao del Norte, where Fr.
Giancarlo Bossi and his captors were sighted.
Maj. Gen. Ben Mohammad Dolorfino
said the agents were supposed to validate the sighting.
“That is what I want to know .
. . the result of the operation, but unfortunately this morning,
they cannot be contacted,” Dolorfino said Wednesday in a
phone-patch conference in Camp Aguinaldo.
He said radio communication in
the mountainous area was weak, making it hard for ground commanders
to contact the intelligence agents.
Dolorfino said the reports that
the priest and his captors were seen in Sapad came from the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
Dolorfino is co-chairman of the
Ad-hoc Joint Action Group of the government panel negotiating with
the MILF.
“At present the effort is
really to locate and cordon off that particular area [so] the
kidnappers cannot move from one place to another,” he said.
Based on the information from the
MILF, Bossi and the group of 13 to 15 kidnappers were last seen in
Sapad late Tuesday afternoon.
Dolorfino described the area as
“mountainous and heavily forested” and that abductors were
familiar with the terrain.
“They [abductors] are from that
place . . . they know the terrain,” said Dolorfino.
He said that since Monday he had
not heard from the MILF’s Mohammad Nassif who is negotiating for
Bossi’s release.
Dolorfino admitted that the
kidnappers slipped through a military dragnet in Naga, Zamboanga
Sibugay.
The 57-year-old Bossi was seized
in a remote village in Payao, Zamboanga Sibugay, while on his way to
church on June 10.
He is the third Italian priest to
be kidnapped in the Zamboanga peninsula in 10 years, after Luciano
Benedetti in 1998 and Guiseppe Pierantoni in 2000.
The two were subsequently
released.
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