U.S. Missionary Kidnaped in Philippines

Kidnapers dragged an American Protestant missionary from his home in the southern Philippines one day after 10 Filipino Roman Catholic nuns were abducted from a nearby convent, officials said Sunday.

No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapings in the mostly Muslim city of Marawi, on Mindanao Island 500 miles south of Manila.

A spokesman for the army’s Southern Command said about 20 suspected members of the Moro National Liberation Front broke into the home of Brian Lawrence inside a Mindanao State University compound in Marawi on Saturday night.

Lawrence, 30, from Madison, Wis., was dragged into a waiting vehicle. His wife escaped by hiding inside a cabinet, the spokesman said.

In Manila, U.S. Embassy spokesman Alan Croghan said that the Philippine Defense Ministry told U.S. officials of the abduction and that the embassy is trying to get more information.

In the earlier abductions, all 10 Carmelite nuns at a hilltop convent two miles from the university were kidnaped Friday night, said Brig. Gen. Pedro Balbanero, deputy chief of the Southern Command.

According to Balbanero, Father Michael Fitzgerald, head of the Carmelite fathers religious order in the Philippines, quoted a woman as saying she saw armed men lead the nuns down the hill from their convent and take them away on two motorboats.

Fitzgerald said the nuns had been cloistered for six years in the convent, spending their lives in prayer and venturing outside only in extreme necessity, such as illness.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, Balbanero said he suspected that the abductors were Muslim terrorists seeking to embarrass President Corazon Aquino’s 4 1/2-month-old government.

Lawrence is the eighth foreigner and the third American to be kidnaped in the southern Philippines in the last eight years. The military has blamed most of the kidnapings on Muslim rebels fighting for self-rule.

In Manila, meanwhile, riot police chased supporters of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos around a downtown park Sunday to prevent them from holding a rally.