Destroy The Bandits

Book excerpt: Andrea Gonzales has been a newscaster and program host in DWRD Radio Davao for five years. The first news item she was to read that day in August 2016 stirred her emotions, for it was about the beheading of a local teenage boy by the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic bandit group in the island province of Sulu. The Islamic bandit group had kidnapped both foreign nationals and locals for ransom. They had built a reputation for terror by beheading their victims whose families would not pay the ransom demanded by the bandit group. It had never been the policy of the Philippine government to pay ransom for kidnap victims. The Philippine government states that paying the ransom money demanded by kidnap-for-ransom groups will only encourage more kidnappings, giving more headache and shame to the President and his cabinet, as well as to the Armed Forces of the Philippines or AFP and the Philippine National Police or PNP.