Abu Sayyaf kidnappers set captive Tausug school teacher free

COTABATO CITY --- Abu Sayyaf gunmen set free before dawn Tuesday a Tausug public school teacher snatched in Sulu island province over the weekend.Lawyer Rasol Mitmug,Jr., regional secretary of the Department of Education-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said at noontime Tuesday that high school teacher Shariff Benjamin Asamli Ubaid is now back to his family after about three days of captivity. I received information from provincial education officials in Sulu that the kidnapped teacher has been released, said Mitmug, who has ministerial control over the Sulu DepEd provincial office.Ubaid is a teacher in the Luuk National High School in Luuk town in Sulu.Chief Superintendent Graciano Mijares of the Police Regional Office-ARMM said the victim was abducted Saturday afternoon in Barangay Latih in Patikul near Jolo, capital town of Sulu province. He was flagged down by armed men while on his way to a bakery there, blindfolded and brought somewhere else. One of his abductors called his relative using his mobile phone to ask for ransom, Mijares said.Talks have been spreading around in Jolo purporting that the family of Ubaid paid his captors P200,000 for his release.The Sulu provincial police and units of the Western Mindanao Command in the island province launched a search for Ubaid only last Monday since his relatives reported the incident quite late.Mijares said probers are still validating the alleged payment of ransom to the kidnappers. The government doesn’t allow that. We are to verify that yet, he said.Reports reaching the office of Mitmug in the ARMM capitol in Cotabato City indicated that officials of DepEd in Sulu also helped pressure the captors of Ubaid to set him free.Mijares said investigators are now trying to determine the exact identities of the culprits for them to be charged with kidnapping in a local court.Sulu, touted as the most dangerous province in Southern Philippines, is a bastion of the Islamic State-inspired Abu Sayyaf.Sulu, which has two congressional districts, accounts for most number of deadly clan wars from among ARMM’s five provinces.More than 20 personnel of the education, health and social welfare departments of ARMM were kidnapped in Sulu in the past five years by Abu Sayyaf gunmen.Abu Sayyaf members in Sulu have in recent years beheaded more than 20 captives, some of them foreigners snatched in nearby provinces and in island resorts in nearby Malaysia, after their families failed to pay ransom.