Shots, then women screamed
Print Edition
A TOURIST from Shanghai was one of two women abducted from a Malaysian diving resort off Borneo by suspected Filipino insurgents late on Wednesday, Malaysian officials said yesterday.
Gao Huayun, 29, and hotel receptionist Marcy Dayawan, 40, from the Philippines, were taken at around 10:30pm from Semporna’s Singamata Reef Resort in the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah by seven gunmen, according to Malaysian police.
The kidnapping underscored persistent security threats in Sabah, a popular tourist destination a short boat ride from the southern Philippines, long home to a dangerous mix of Muslim militants and kidnap gangs.
Gao had flown to Malaysia from Hangzhou on Tuesday, tourist officials in Shanghai said.
Early yesterday, police in Shanghai’s Yangpu District were contacted by a local woman surnamed Xu who said she had lost touch with her daughter, who was traveling in Malaysia with a friend.
Police then confirmed that the abducted Chinese tourist was her daughter Gao Huayun.
A kidnap-for-ransom gang based in the southern Philippines is suspected of seizing the women, authorities said.
The seven men armed with rifles, four of them masked, raided the resort after arriving there on a speedboat, according to a police statement.
Gao was seized from the balcony of her room, The Associated Press quoted Sabah police Commissioner Hamza Taib as saying.
Police suspected the group had “inside help” from someone at the resort but didn’t elaborate.
Taib said the gang would likely sell the victims to another militant group that would seek ransoms, and was believed to have already left Malaysian waters for somewhere in the southern Philippines.
A reporter from the West China Metropolis Daily, who was at the resort, said the whole incident was over in a minute.
About 60 Chinese and European tourists at the hotel dropped to the floor when they heard shots and women screaming, the newspaper reported.
Another witness saw the kidnappers leaving by boat as the two women screamed for help.
Armed police arrived at the hotel about 30 minutes later.
Gao was on holiday with a friend, her father said, after having been accepted for an MBA course at a British university.
Gao’s friend, surnamed Su, told the Oriental Morning Post she had been in the bathroom when she heard noises and someone shouting that there were thieves.
When it got quiet she went to look for Gao and learned that the women had been taken away by gangsters.
Xinhua news agency said Chinese embassy officials in Malaysia had met Sabah’s chief of police and the state’s tourism minister, urging them to confirm and investigate the incident quickly. Embassy officials were on their way to the island resort, Xinhua added.
A Philippine intelligence official said earlier the attackers were believed to be from the Abu Sayyaf, a militant Philippine Muslim group that has carried out seaborne kidnappings in the region before.
Last November, suspected Abu Sayyaf militants killed a Taiwanese tourist and kidnapped his wife from a resort in the Semporna area, AP said.
The woman was released a month later in the southern Philippines. Authorities didn’t say whether a ransom was paid. Such deals are normally not immediately disclosed to the media, if at all.
The Abu Sayyaf had tenuous historical links to international militant networks, including al-Qaida, but a US-assisted Philippine military crackdown in the Philippines has weakened it considerably, according to AP.
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