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A courtroom has sentenced to life 17 Islamic militants for kidnapping 21 folks, together with European vacationers and Asian staff, from a dive resort in Malaysia greater than 20 years in the past.
The Filipino militants belonged to the small however violent Abu Sayyaf group.
Amongst these convicted by the Regional Trial Court docket in Taguig metropolis, a suburb of the capital area, have been two Abu Sayyaf leaders, Hilarion Santos and Redendo Dellosa, who had been included in a United Nations terrorism blacklist, the Division of Justice in Manila stated.
The 17 have been sentenced to life in jail with the potential of pardon after 30 years, in response to justice officers.
In April 2000, Abu Sayyaf militants armed with assault rifles and machetes, traveled by speedboats from their southern Philippine jungle strongholds and raided the Sipadan Island dive resort in neighboring Malaysia, the place they kidnapped 21 Western vacationers and resort staff at gunpoint.
The militants are an offshoot of the decades-long Muslim separatist unrest within the southern Philippines, homeland of minority Muslims within the largely Roman Catholic nation. The Philippines and the USA each take into account the Abu Sayyaf a terrorist group.
The militants carried out bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings throughout their heyday beginning within the late Nineteen Nineties, however they’ve been weakened significantly by battle defeats, surrenders and infighting.
The hostages consisted of a German household of three, two vacationers from Finland, a South African couple, a Lebanese girl and two French residents. The remaining have been Malaysians and Filipinos who labored within the far-flung resort.
They have been taken by speedboats to the jungles of the southern Philippine province of Sulu, the place they have been held in harsh situations earlier than being principally ransomed off utilizing thousands and thousands of {dollars} reportedly supplied by then-Libyan chief Moammar Gadhafi.
Two Related Press journalists, who have been allowed by the Abu Sayyaf to interview the hostages whereas they have been in jungle captivity on the time, noticed a lot of the horrified captives sitting on banana leaves laid on the bottom and surrounded by a fence of tree branches. Some quickly scribbled letters and begged their households and embassies to ship them meals, water, medication and discover methods to free them.
After the hostages have been freed, the Philippine army launched offensives that lasted a number of years and resulted within the killing or seize of most of Abu Sayyaf leaders and fighters.
Ghalib Andang, the militant who led the kidnapping, was killed by police commandos throughout an tried jailbreak and siege in a high-security detention middle in 2005 in metropolitan Manila.
