Google map showing Tawi-Tawi (right) and Sabah, including Lahad Datu.
Gunmen believed to be members of the Abu Sayyaf kidnapped four Indonesian sailors and killed another on the high seas between Sitangkai, Tawi-Tawi and Lahad Datu in Sabah, Malaysia on Friday.
A military spot report forwarded by an intelligence source said the gunmen boarded the T/B Henry, an Indonesian tugboat, around 5 p.m.
Malaysian authorities from Lahad Datu later retrieved the tugboat with the five surviving crewmen and the fatality, the report said. It did not say where the tugboat was headed.
Friday’s incident happened little more than two weeks after 10 Indonesian sailors were also kidnapped off Sulu by suspected Abu Sayyaf gunmen on March 28.
The victims of the earlier kidnapping were the crew of a tugboat hauling a coal barge to Luzon.
Recently, Malaysia, whose citizens have often been victimized by the Abu Sayyaf, closed the maritime border between Sabah and Tawi-Tawi, the southernmost province of the country and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
The move followed the April 2 kidnapping of four Malaysians from a ship off Sabah’s east coast. Five other crew members, from Myanmar and Indonesia, were left behind unharmed.
On Saturday, a Sulu-based women’s group appealed to Malaysia to reopen the border and allow travel and trade to resume between the southern Philippines and Sabah.
The Lupah Sug Bangsamoro Women Association Inc., in a statement, also called on the Philippine government “to dialogue with Malaysia to take collaborative and nuanced actions to address security and economic issues in its shared borders.”
The group called the border closure “a perverse application of beggar thy neighbor policies.”
It said “curbing criminal activity in the cross-border area that separates Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines is not achieved by unilateral action, but requires joint policing, targeted punitive action, and the uniform application of laws against deadly shadow economies such as piracy and kidnap-for-ransom that plague these porous frontiers.”
The “arbitrary, counter-productive” border closing, it added, “will not bring about a long-term solution to the problem of criminal terrorism that Malaysia and the Philippines both face” but merely “punishes legitimate businessmen, traders, including tourists and relatives of families living in Sabah who had no hand in the kidnapping, and are in fact victimized by the same piracy and other threats to their lives and livelihoods.”
“By closing its borders, Malaysia succumbs to the fear and threat of criminal extremism that the perpetrators wanted to create, a threat that should unite rather than tear us apart,” the group said.
It pointed out that communities in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi “already feel the brunt of the blockade with the spike in food and petroleum prices already 70 percent to date, threatening food security in the area,” creating “deep economic and social repercussions to the already strained condition in Mindanao brought about by the drought and the energy crisis.”
http://interaksyon.com/article/126518/4-indonesian-sailors-kidnapped-1-killed-in-seas-between-tawi-tawi-sabah---report
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