EXTREMISTS ABDUCT PRIEST, DOZEN OTHERS
Muslim extremists abducted a Catholic priest and more than a dozen churchgoers while laying siege to Marawi City overnight, burning buildings, ambushing soldiers and hoisting flags of the Islamic State group, officials said Wednesday.
President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao and warned he would enforce it harshly.
The violence erupted Tuesday night after the army raided the hideout of Isnilon Hapilon, an Abu Sayyaf commander who is on Washington's list of most-wanted terrorists with a reward of up to $5 million for his capture. The militants called for reinforcements from an allied group, the Maute, and some 50 gunmen managed to enter the city of Marawi.
"We are in a state of emergency," Duterte said after landing in Manila from a visit to Moscow, adding that skirmishes were continuing. "I have a serious problem in Mindanao and the ISIS footprints are everywhere."
He said he may declare martial law elsewhere in the Philippines if militants expand their attacks.
Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, and Marawi Bishop Edwin de la Pena said the militants forced their way into the Marawi Cathedral and seized a priest, 10 worshippers and three church workers.
The priest, Father Chito, and the others had no role in the conflict, Villegas said.
"He was not a combatant. He was not bearing arms. He was a threat to none," Villegas said of Chito. "His capture and that of his companions violates every norm of civilized conflict."
Villegas says the gunmen are demanding the government recall its forces.
Duterte declared martial rule for 60 days in the entire Mindanao. He had vowed to be "harsh."
"I warned everybody not to force my hand into it," Duterte said on a plane en route to the Philippines on Wednesday. "I have to do it to preserve the republic."
Martial law allows Duterte to harness the armed forces to carry out arrests, searches and detentions more rapidly. He has re- peatedly threatened to place the south, the scene of decades-long Muslim separatist uprisings, under martial law. But human rights groups have expressed fears that martial law powers could further embolden Duterte, whom they have accused of allowing extrajudicial killings of thousands of drug suspects in a crackdown on illegal drugs.
Details from inside Marawi were sketchy because the largely Muslim city of more than 200,000 people appeared to be largely sealed off and without electricity.
"The whole of Marawi city is blacked out, there is no light, and there are Maute snipers all around," Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said late Tuesday in Moscow, where he was accompanying Duterte on an official trip. Duterte cut the trip short and headed back to the Philippines.
Lorenzana said dozens of gunmen occupied city hall, a hospital and a jail and burned a Catholic church, a college and some houses in an assault that killed at least two soldiers and a police officer and wounded 12 others.