Confusion Reigns After Malay Resort Kidnapping
International Herald Tribune
April 26, 2000
Thomas Fuller

From the comfort of his five-star hotel room here, Jim Murphy says he re-enacts the scene over and over in his head.

The gunmen yelling: "Move it, goddamn it. Move it." And his panicked reply: You can kill me but my wife is not going on that boat.

Somewhere in the Celebes Sea is the fate that Jim Murphy and his wife, Mary, escaped: six highly armed men continue to hold 21 hostages, all of them abducted from a tiny island off Borneo on Sunday night. The police revised the number of hostages to 21 Tuesday from the initial estimate of 20. They include employees of the Malaysian park service, a police officer, at least one Filipino hotel worker and 10 tourists: two Frenchmen, two Finns, three Germans, two South Africans and one Lebanese.

But more than 50 hours after the incident took place, details surrounding the kidnapping remain mired in confusion, with officials contradicting themselves as to the possible motives or whereabouts of the kidnappers.

On Monday, the Malaysian defense minister, Najib Tun Razak, said the government had found the kidnappers' "exact location." But the police chief of Sabah, the Malaysian state where the abduction took place, said Tuesday the government was not so sure.

"They are somewhere in the neighboring country," Mamat Talib, the police chief, said, referring to the Philippines, "but we cannot establish exactly where the hostages are." The police chief added that five people were being questioned in connection with the incident, some of them former employees of the Sipadan Island resort.

Confusion also surrounded the identity of the kidnappers. Muslim separatists in the Philippines, who on Tuesday morning initially claimed responsibility for the incident, subsequently issued a bizarre quasi-retraction. "I'm not saying that we are the ones," said Abu Ahmad, a spokesman for the rebel group, known as Abu Sayyaf. "I'm also not saying we are not the ones. Let's give the government a puzzle."

The tourists were staying on Sipadan Island, a favorite spot for divers about 30 kilometers (20 miles) off Borneo. Mr. Murphy, an amateur underwater photographer who works for Kodak in Australia, refused to board the two boats with the other captives. "I was thinking they were just going to dump us in the water," he said Tuesday. "My wife not only can't swim, she's deathly afraid of water. I knew she wouldn't have a shot if they threw her in 10 feet of water. She'd freak out." The captors, preoccupied with getting the other 21 hostages onto the boats, looked the other way. The Murphys ran into the forest and lay there for 10 hours until the sun came up the next morning.

Mr. Murphy said he believed the kidnappers were not run-of-the-mill sea pirates, a common scourge in the relatively lawless seas of the area. "If they were going to go for money they would have rifled through people's rooms," he said. "Everybody had cameras or video. A lot of people had underwater equipment." A Malaysian newspaper quoted an employee of the Sipadan resort as saying that the abductors had written "Abu Sayyaf" on the walls of the Wildlife Department office before leaving the island.

The Philippine government recently started a military offensive against the Abu Sayyaf group, who is fighting for an Islamic state in the southern Philippines. The group is currently holding close to 30 hostages in the southern Philippines and have demanded the release of Islamic militants held in U.S. prisons, including one believed to have been involved in the 1993 bomb attack on World Trade Center in New York. On Tuesday, a Philippine provincial governor offered a $730-dollar bounty for each member of the Abu Sayyaf group killed. The governor of Basilan, Wahab Akbar, also issued a "shoot-to-kill order" to his armed civilian followers for any rebel they see fleeing the government's military offensive, Agence France-Presse said.

Also Tuesday, Philippine forces rocketed Islamic rebel positions for the fourth day, hours after one of the people held by the guerrillas warned the army assault was endangering hostages' lives. "We have to go on with the operation," said a southern military commander, General Diomedio Villanueva. "What we are hitting is the periphery, the bunkers, to dislodge the terrorists guarding their main lair."

Earlier Tuesday, a local radio station broadcast an appeal from a hostage Catholic priest for the military to stop bombing the hideout of the Abu Sayyaf group on Basilan Island. The military said it had no confirmed casualty figures, but a Basilan provincial government spokesman, Hader Glang, said about 30 guerrillas had been killed in the four-day government offensive to try and rescue the hostages.

Meanwhile, Germany urged its citizens not to travel to Sabah. Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad said that the kidnapping would affect tourism in Sabah but not in the rest of the country. "Malaysia is very safe for tourists," he told the Bernama news agency. "We don't get this kind of things happening in Malaysia very often."

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune