OWN CORRESPONDENT, Zamboanga | Tusday 9.00am.
MANY of the hostages abducted from a Malaysian resort last weekend are on the verge of a nervous breakdown, South Africa’s Monique Strydom already having collapsed.
The hostages being held by Muslim extremists are asking for food and clean water, a kidnapper, Abu Issa, said in an interview with a local radio station. The hostages include Strydom and her husband, Callie, two Germans, two from France, two from Finland, a woman from Lebanon, and resort workers from the Philippines and Malaysia.
The condition of the hostages seems to have worsened since the filming of a video shot on Saturday by a freelance Filipino journalist. The Abu Sayyaf also told a local radio station on Monday that a South African had collapsed, apparently due to exhaustion and hunger. ”A woman hostage, from Africa, just collapsed this morning. Maybe she’s tired and hungry,” group spokesman Abu Issa said in a telephone interview with Radio Mindanao Network in the southern city of Zamboanga. Meanwhile, a government doctor, delivering food and medicine to the hostages, was allegedly shot at when her party arrived at the Abu Sayyaf camp in southern Philippines.
The mission to the Abu Sayyaf group camp was the first help from the outside world for the captives since they were snatched from a diving resort off Malaysia on 23 April.
The doctor and a medic would remain overnight at the camp to treat the hostages while three journalists who accompanied them returned to the provincial capital of Jolo island. According to one of the journalists, many of the hostages appeared gaunt and on the brink of a nervous breakdown. A journalist who was allowed to visit the hostages on Saturday reported that the captives are suffering from diarrhoea, dehydration and emotional distress, and that their feet were injured from long hours of marching through jungle with their captors.
The hostages were seen on Monday pleading in television pictures which revealed for the first time the extent of their ordeal in the Muslim extremist group’s jungle hideout. The hostages were seen crammed in what appeared to be a small bamboo hut, complaining of hunger, dehydration, exhaustion and weakness. — Reuters