Word: malaysians
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...Despite the threats, the President is holding firm. Arroyo, say her advisers, wants to keep Abu Sayyaf on the run. The last time the group took hostages from a tourist resort?21 were seized in April last year on Sipadan, a famous diving site on the Malaysian coast?they collected an estimated $25 million in ransom. But even before the Sipadan raid, the name Abu Sayyaf raised alarm among Western intelligence agencies. Abu Sayyaf kept surfacing in connection with various plots by Islamic terrorist Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, now serving a life sentence for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing...
...Philippines, and anyone who has visited its idyllic resorts, the episode was shockingly familiar. A little more than a year ago, the same group of Muslim rebels kidnapped 21 people, including 9 Malaysians, 8 Europeans, 2 South Africans and 2 Filipinos, from the eastern Malaysian diving resort of Sipadan. Over the following four months, they auctioned them off for a whispered total of up to $25 million in ransom money. Bad enough that it happened again: even more frightening, it was clear from day one of the most recent crisis that the resolution would be swifter and a lot more...
...Added to that are political concerns. The Philippines has a new President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and she announced from the start that she had no intention of suffering the humiliation dealt predecessor Joseph Estrada last year. Estrada succumbed to Malaysian and European pleas to hold the troops back and allowed Libya to broker a ransom deal. As a result, the ragtag band of one year ago has grown into a kidnapping army that can only get more audacious with every success. With Washington's backing, Arroyo refused all negotiation and ordered 5,000 troops into the scattered Sulu archipelago...
Reading the papers on April 23 must have sent a chill through Malaysian Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin. His boss and friend of 20 years, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, had given a speech in which he said that "abundantly rich" members of the ruling United Malays National Organization should be barred from holding important posts in the party. Daim, who has been in the party's top echelon for 20 years, just happens to be one of the country's wealthiest individuals. Coming at a time when relations between the two men were already strained, it must have made...
...caught in the middle of a political earthquake. "Mahathir had better make sure that while he's trimming the deadwood he doesn't saw off the branch he's sitting on," says a political analyst in Kuala Lumpur. But, then, Mahathir is the great survivor of Malaysian politics...