The kidnapping happened barely two weeks after President Benigno Aquino III visited Samal to inspect a road project on the island, which is being developed as an alternative tourist destination to Boracay in Panay.
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Captain Albert Caber, Public Information Officer chief of the Eastern Mindanao Command, said in an interview on ANC that the area where the abduction took place had 30 people, mostly foreigners.
Police identified the Norwegian as Kjartan Sekkingstad, the resort’s marina manager, and Canadians as John Ridsel and Robert Hall.
A spokesman for the army said gunmen kidnapped the group from the Holiday Oceanview resort on Samal Island, near Davao City on Mindanao, late on Monday.
Reports reaching the AKG said the suspects, after taking the victims at gunpoint, got on a motorized banca and sped off toward an undetermined direction.
The Davao region has been relatively peaceful for more than a decade. He said there were about 30 foreign tourists at the resort at the time of the raid.
The Foreign Office has updated its advice, which was already warning against all travel to southwest Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago “because of ongoing terrorist activity and clashes between military and insurgent groups”.
“We’ve requested the resort owner to have the CCTV (close-circuit television) footage on the scene be enhanced to aid us in the investigation”, said Gadingan.
Military sources said the gunmen spoke English and Tagalog, the language spoken widely in the Philippines.
Two Japanese tourists also reportedly tried to intervene but were unsuccessful. The country’s navy has sent out three ships to look for the victims.
There were security guards at the resort during the abduction, but they were outnumbered by the abductors, who allegedly belong to the group “Bama”.
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In 2001 Abu Sayyaf militants tried to seize hostages from the Pearl Farm Beach Resort south of Oceanview during a ransom-kidnapping spree in the early 2000s in the southern Philippines.
