|
Nigerian militants have released eight Filipinos and
three South Koreans kidnapped last week at a Daewoo construction
site in the country’s oil-rich south, industry sources and a
report said Tuesday.
“All 11 were released at around
5 p.m. [midnight Tuesday in Manila]. They are in Port Harcourt,”
said one industry source who asked not to be named.
The South Korean official news
agency Yonhap quoted government officials confirming the release and
saying that all 11 were exhausted but safe.
The men, three Korean executives
from Daewoo Engineering and Construction and eight Filipino workers
from the same company, were kidnapped last Thursday after a gunfight
at their construction site in the southern Rivers State.
The kidnapped Koreans include
Chung Tae-Young, a 52-year-old Daewoo managing director, who was on
a business trip to the area, and two top Daewoo officials in
Nigeria, according to Daewoo spokesman Huh Hyon.
It was the third time Daewoo
workers have been taken hostage in Nigeria.
The Philippines on Monday had
rejected appeals to directly negotiate with the gunmen, who have not
been identified and whose demands remained unknown.
It was not yet clear whether a
ransom had been paid, the South Korean envoy to Nigeria, Lee Kie-dong,
said in Yonhap’s dispatch. An agreement was struck after Rivers
State officials weighed demands made by the kidnappers on Tuesday,
he said in the report.
In Manila, Foreign Affairs
Undersecretary Esteban Conejos had said the Philippine government
would rely on the Nigerian government to bring an end to the crisis.
A day earlier, one of the
Filipino hostages appealed for help in a recorded radio message,
saying they were being beaten and starved by their captors in a
Nigerian jungle.
But in the same recording, a
heavily accented voice could be heard in the background telling the
hostage what to say.
On Monday, 26 of 45 Filipinos who
also worked in the Daewoo compound were flown home to Manila,
Conejos said.
The rest had been scheduled to
fly back Tuesday but it was not immediately clear if they had
already left.
The release came as southern
Nigeria’s most high-profile armed group, the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), early Tuesday sabotaged
three pipelines and vowed to keep up its attacks on oil targets.
Rich in oil reserves, the Niger
Delta area has been at the center of a long confrontation between
the government, militants who claim to be fighting for a larger
share of the country’s oil resources for local people, and a
plethora of armed gangs out to make ransom money.
More than 150 foreign workers
have been kidnapped since the start of 2006, most, but not all of
them connected to the oil industry.
The vast majority have been
released unharmed. One or two however have been injured or killed by
the Nigerian military in bungled rescue attempts.
There was a lull in kidnappings
during the Nigerian elections but the armed groups have made up for
lost time, seizing at least 28 foreigners since May 1.
The Department of Foreign Affairs
refused to say if ransom was paid for the Filipino workers’
release.
DFA spokesman Claro Cristobal
said the Philippine government did not directly participate in the
hostage negotiations.
Cristobal said the government’s
ban on travel and deployment to Nigeria remains.
“We are reiterating the ban. We
want to keep our nationals away from trouble in Nigeria,” he said.
Last Sunday, dzBB radio aired an
appeal from one of the kidnapped Filipinos who said he and the other
hostages were being maltreated by their captors.
--AFP and Francis Earl A. Cueto
|
