Intel units validating reports on location in Marawi of captive-priest

LANAO DEL SUR --- The military is now validating reports by evacuees that Catholic priest Teresito Suganob is still being held hostage by militants somewhere in Marawi City.Suganob and more than a dozen lay workers and worshipers were snatched while inside the St. Mary’s Church in Marawi City by Maute and Abu Sayyaf terrorists that laid siege in several villages there on May 23. We got information from evacuees rescued last Sunday from conflict-affected barangays that Fr. Chito is still alive but is a virtual captive. The information is being checked now, Lt. Gen. Carlito Galvez, Jr. of the Western Mindanao Command told this news outfit by phone at past 6and00 a.m. Monday.The captors of Suganob circulated on May 28 via Facebook a video of him appealing to President Rodrigo Duterte to stop the airstrikes against the terrorists then occupying more than 10 strategic areas in Marawi City.Galvez said intelligence units are now trying to verify the reported sighting of Suganob by internally-displaced people extricated from their villages amid Sunday’s eight-hour suspension of offensives against Maute and Abu Sayyaf gunmen, now combined in the Dawlah Islamiya.The Dawlah Islamia, led by siblings Omar and Abdullah Maute and the long wanted figurehead of a faction in the Abu Sayyaf, Isnilon Hapilon, is claiming allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and is using the black ISIS flag as its banner.Chief Supt. Reuben Theodore Sindac, police director for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), said on Monday that their intelligence operatives have tapped the municipal peace and order councils in all 39 towns in Lanao del Sur to help validate the assertions by evacuees privy to Suganob’s captivity by terrorists.Sindac said their effort is being initiated in coordination with commanders of military units in Marawi City, capital of Lanao del Sur, a component province of ARMM.