Hostages Taken from Boats Appear in Video
Three weeks after being kidnapped from the Ocean View Resort Marina on Samal Island in the southern Philippines, three foreign nationals and a Filipina woman appear in a video just released by an unidentified terrorist group believed to be affiliated in some way with ISIS.
The male hostages are Robert Hall, John Ridsdel and Kjartan Sekkingstad. In the video they are seen pleading for help from the Canadian and Philippine governments, while surrounded by masked, heavily armed militants and jihadist flags. The Filipina woman, believed to be Hall’s partner Tess, last name unknown, does not speak.
Anti-government activity has long been a fact of life in the southern Philippines, which is popular with cruisers because there isn’t as great a threat from typhoons.
Hall, about 50, is from Canada, and was living aboard his boat Renova. Ridsdel, 68, is the former chief operating officer of mining company TVI Resource Development Philippines, Inc., and was living on his catamaran Aziza. He had spent 25 years working in “hostile environment” areas of the world, from Pakistan to Burma to Algeria. Sekkingstad, who is Norwegian and the marina manager, lived on Wiskun. A resident of Vancouver before taking off across the Pacific in 2002, his partner and later wife was Ellen Lee Kwen, a member of the powerful family that developed the Ocean View Resort and Marina. She died in 2013.
The kidnappers had initially tried to seize American cruisers Steven Tripp and his Japanese wife Kazuko Shibata-Tripp of the boat Outstripp on the night of September 21. But the couple struggled so valiantly that the heavily armed militants decided to take the other four, who had come to see what the ruckus was about and were apparently more compliant. A marina video shows the hostages being led to a boat that would take them away.
The just-released video starts with Hall identifying himself and asking that relatives and friends contact the Canadian and Philippine governments to try to get them to stop military operations that affect the southern Filipino province of Mindinao. The camera then pans to Kjartan Sekkingstad, manager of the marina. He repeats Hall’s pleas and says if the group’s demands are not met the hostages might be killed. John Ridsdel, with a machete being held to his head, then appears to confirm they’d been taken from Ocean View Marina.
A terrorist whose face is covered in a green and black scarf then appears, demanding, in English, that the Philippine and Canadian governments cease military actions as a prerequisite to opening negotiations for the hostages’ release. The militants then start chanting in Arabic and raising their guns.
A spokesperson for the Philippine government responded by saying there would be no changes in the deployment of police and government troops. He also noted that they hadn’t received any monetary demands yet. Kidnapping for cash is not uncommon in the southern Philippines.