JAKARTA, Indonesia — Hijackers are holding 10 Indonesian crew members from a tugboat that they seized in waters off the Philippines, in the latest high-profile case of piracy in the region, officials from both countries said on Tuesday.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Hijackers are holding 10 Indonesian crew members from a tugboat that they seized in waters off the Philippines, in the latest high-profile case of piracy in the region, officials from both countries said on Tuesday.
The tugboat, an Indonesian-flagged ship named the Brahma 12, was eventually set adrift, but the hijackers kept a barge it was hauling that held 7,000 tons of coal, as well as the entire crew, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The Philippine military said the hijacking occurred on Saturday evening.
Someone claiming to represent Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamist group based in the southern Philippines, twice called the Indonesian company that owns the ship, demanding a ransom for the 10 captive sailors, the Indonesian statement said.
Abu Sayyaf has a long history of kidnappings for ransom and terrorist attacks in the Philippines. It has received support from al-Qaida in the past, but security analysts and the Philippine military have said that it operates mainly as a nonideological, for-profit criminal organization. The United States designated it a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.
The tugboat had been sailing from the town of Sungai Puting in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan province on Borneo island — which has a large coal port — to Batangas, which lies on the island of Luzon in the southern Philippines, when it was hijacked, the Indonesian statement said. It said the Indonesian government was coordinating with the Philippine Ministry of Foreign Affairs to respond to what it called an act of piracy.
Col. Restituto Padilla, a spokesman for the Philippine military, did not confirm that Abu Sayyaf was responsible for the hijacking. He said that the tugboat was seized by an unidentified group using small motorized boats, and that the hijackers had stripped the vessel of valuables before setting it adrift. The Philippine coast guard recovered the vessel, he said.
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