Philippines Narrows U.S. Hostage Search

Philippine armed forces, with U.S. assistance, have determined the general location of two American hostages being held by Islamic militants on the southern island of Basilan and are ready to launch operations to free them, the country’s chief military spokesman said Thursday.

Brig. Gen. Edilberto Adan said he expected new sightings of American missionary couple Martin and Gracia Burnham to come quickly, now that U.S. military personnel and high-technology surveillance and communications equipment had arrived on the island.

“Maybe in the next few days,” he said. “We have a good idea of the general location of the Burnhams. We’re now awaiting the results of our latest initiatives.”

The Abu Sayyaf extremist group is holding a third hostage, a Philippine nurse named Deborah Yap, seized from a hospital in Basilan a few days after the Burnhams.

Under a U.S.-Philippine agreement signed last month, 660 American military personnel, along with aircraft and equipment, have been deployed to the Philippines to help rescue the hostages and crush the Abu Sayyaf rebels. A total of 160 U.S. Army Special Forces troops are on Basilan, with the remaining 500 uniformed personnel in support elsewhere.

“This has increased our awareness dramatically,” Adan said.

Adan described the new initiatives as a combination of three factors: American P-3 surveillance aircraft patrolling overhead, U.S. specialists now on the ground trained to interpret the electronic imagery gathered from the sky, and the fruits of local informants who have been offered rewards for information on the Burnhams’ whereabouts.

“We’ve had the aircraft for a while, but there was no one on the ground to interpret what they were picking up,” Adan said. “Now they are in place.”

The Manila newspaper Philippine Star posted a report on its Web site late Thursday evening quoting the mayor of the remote Basilan village of Maluso, who claimed that all three hostages had been seen last week moving through the community. The report could not be independently confirmed.

A Philippine force of about 3,500 has been deployed on Basilan to rescue the hostages and flush out or kill Abu Sayyaf members holding them. The government estimates the group’s strength at about 80 fighters.

A far larger group of several hundred Abu Sayyaf fighters is believed to be on the nearby island of Jolo.

Although vastly outnumbered, the Islamic militants have avoided detection and capture since taking the Burnhams in May. They’ve been helped by the dense jungle that covers much of the island and by the fact that the poorly equipped Philippine forces have been unable to react quickly when the hostages have been sighted before.

In addition, the Abu Sayyaf has been aided by the support of another group of Muslim activists who share the goal of making the area an independent Islamic homeland. On Thursday, a former Abu Sayyaf hostage told a congressional hearing in Manila that he was handed over for a month to members of the other, larger group, known as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The Philippine military force, which includes marine and army units, has only three helicopters, each capable of transporting only nine soldiers, and communicates using old two-way radios that have a maximum range of just over one mile.

Adan said that with the arrival of the Americans, the rebels were guarding their hostages with a new level of intensity.

The terms of the U.S.-Philippine agreement, part of the American-led effort to crush international terrorist groups, forbid the Americans from engaging in combat, but they can defend themselves.

The national television channel ABS-CBN released a videotape Thursday of Martin Burnham reading a statement warning that Abu Sayyaf was “targeting U.S. citizens, those from Europe and other nations” for a variety of grievances, including Western support for Israel, sanctions against Iraq and Libya, and the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.

The TV station claimed that the video dated from mid-January, but many questioned that timing.

The Abu Sayyaf group, which first surfaced in the mid-1990s, has financed its quest for an independent Muslim homeland by staging a series of kidnappings for ransom. Senior U.S. officials have linked it to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.