June 18, 2007: The MILF have located a remote
village in the south, where kidnappers are holding an Italian priest. The
kidnappers are seeking ransom, while the police are coming to try and end the
situation quickly. Kidnapping scares away tourists and foreign aid workers.
June 17, 2007: In the central Philippines,
two NPA rebels and four policemen were killed in two clashes. Further south,
the government started putting plainclothes policemen on busses to help catch
the terrorist criminals who have been planting bombs on busses as part of an
extortion plot.
June 16, 2007: Indonesian police have been
interrogating recently captured Abu Dujana, a senior leader of Islamic
terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiah (JI), and it was admitted that JI
was sending money to Islamic terrorists in the Philippines. JI also sent bomb
makers and attack planners to the Philippines, which confirms Filipino
counter-terror forces had long been saying.
June 15, 2007: In the south, ten people were
killed when a bomb went off on a bus. This is apparently a criminal, not
political, act of terrorism. Gangsters trying to get "protection
money" from the bus company will bomb busses if the payments are not made.
Earlier, a bomb had gone off in another, empty, bus, and there were no
injuries.
June 14, 2007: Leftists at home and abroad
are demanding to know who in the government was involved with a death squad
operation that killed 800 leftist activists in the last year. Decades of
murderous terror by the NPA have not made leftists all that popular, but the
pressure from foreign leftists has prevented the government from doing a cover
up on what is apparently an illegal military campaign to kill NPA
sympathizers.
June 13, 2007: The kidnapped Italian priest
is being held by a criminal gang, some of whom have kin in the MILF, and the
MILF is using those contacts to try and get the priest released.
Elsewhere in the south, police disarmed a car bomb found outside a town
hall.
June 10, 2007: In the south, an Italian
missionary priest was kidnapped, by what appeared to be a group of rogue MILF
rebels. Small bands of MILF gunmen turning to banditry is a growing problem.
