Philippine forces find getaway boats of gang holding foreigners

MANILA, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Philippine forces searching for
three kidnapped foreigners and a Philippine woman have found the
getaway boats their abductors used but have yet to determine who
grabbed the four from a southern resort, an army spokesman said
on Wednesday.
Gunmen kidnapped two Canadian tourists, a Norwegian resort
manager and a Filipino woman late on Monday at a resort on Samal
island, near Davao City, the largest city on Mindanao island in
the southern Philippines.
The gang escaped with their hostages in boats.
The attack was a reminder that insecurity persists in the
south despite a 2014 peace agreement with the largest Muslim
rebel group that ended 45 years of conflict in which about
120,000 people were killed and 2 million displaced.
Various small Islamist and communist rebel factions, as well
as criminal gangs, operate in the area and authorities were
still trying to determine who carried out the kidnapping.
"At this point, we still could not identify any group behind
the abduction," Colonel Noel Detoyato, an army spokesman, told a
news briefing.
"Two motorised bancas were recovered on the shores of
Tibanban," he said, referring out-rigger boats found near
Tibanban village, about 100 km (60 miles) southeast from the
island where the kidnappings took place.
Troops were scouring the area and four patrol boats and four
helicopters had joined the search, he said.
A note left at the resort and purportedly linking the raid
to Maoist rebels was believed to have been a fake, aimed at
diverting the security forces, he said.
Authorities were still investigating the possibility that
members of the al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf Islamist militant
group could have been involved, he said.
Members of the group have kidnapped foreign tourists in the
southern Philippines several times and they had attempted in
2001 to abduct people on Samal island, Detoyato said.
Another Philippine military source, who declined to be
identified, said authorities had got wind of an Abu Sayyaf plot
to kidnap people on Samal this month.
Philippine authorities have identified the abducted
foreigners as John Ridsdel and Robert Hall from Canada and
Kjartan Sekkingstad, the Norwegian manager of the resort. The
Filipino woman, identified only as Tess, is Hall's partner.