A military crackdown in the Philippines has yielded more members and supporters of the Abu Sayyaf kidnapping group but still failed to find their 21 American and Filipino hostages, officials said Saturday.
Lieutenant General Gregorio Camiling, head of military forces in the southern Philippines, said 10 more Abu Sayyaf members and supporters were due to surrender soon on the island of Jolo.
This was in addition to 12 who surrendered on Jolo on Friday, Camiling told a press conference before flying to Jolo to attend the official surrender ceremony where the 12 handed in their rifles.
Leader of the 12, Isa Biao, said they had surrendered because their leader in Jolo, the notorious Ghalib Andang, known as "Commander Robot", had stopped giving them supplies.
He said that Andang, who was involved in the abduction of 21 mostly-foreign hostages from a Malaysian resort last year, was "always moving and moving" to avoid the military pursuit.
But he did not give any details about the sole remaining hostage of last year's kidnapping, Filipino divemaster Roland Ullah, held for more than a year now.
The latest surrenders follow the launch last week of a crackdown on supporters of the Muslim group in their strongholds around the southern islands and the nearby city of Zamboanga, Camiling said.
About 100 suspected Abu Sayyaf members and supporters have been arrested in Zamboanga and on the islands of Jolo and Basilan. At least 34 of these have been charged with criminal offenses.
However Camiling said troops were still trying to pin down the main Abu Sayyaf band which is holding the 21 hostages in forested areas of Basilan, just a 30-minute boat ride from Zamboanga.
"They are hiding constantly, moving from one place to another," Camiling said, complaining that the rough terrain was slowing down his troops.
He said the last encounter between the military and the group holding the hostages was on July 18 but that the rebels managed to get away.
The general also said they had received reports of foreigners training Muslim rebels in the south to launch attacks in the country's capital, Manila, in retaliation for the operations on Basilan.
Police sources said the foreign Muslims, possibly from Sudan, were reported to be training "suicide urban terrorist groups" for the attacks although Camiling said the military still had to verify the reports.
In Manila, President Gloria Arroyo said in a radio interview that she had allocated an additional one billion pesos (18.7 million dollars) from the budget to modernize the country's police force to deal with the Abu Sayyaf and other security threats.
Arroyo conceded that the country's image had been hurt by the failure to decisively deal with the Abu Sayyaf. The group has been kidnapping foreigners and Christians and holding them for ransom in the south for years, grabbing international headlines in the process.
She said she was working on both long-term and short-term solutions to the problem, including the economic development of the Muslim-populated southern provinces of the Philippines which are among the most poverty-stricken in the country.
She remarked that it was "like a patient, you give him an aspirin while you prepare for an operation".
The Abu Sayyaf snatched 36 Filipinos and three Americans in their latest kidnapping spree which began on May 27.
While some of the locals were freed, reportedly for hefty ransoms, four Filipino hostages were killed. The Abu Sayyaf also said they beheaded one American, Californian Guillermo Sobero, although his body has not been recovered -- ZAMBOANGA, Philippines (AFP)
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