Abu Sayyaf militants released one of three Red Cross hostages, a Filipino woman, on Thursday after 10 weeks in jungle captivity on a southern island, the defense chief announced. There was no word about the two others - Andreas Notter of Switzerland and Eugenio Vagni of Italy. Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro said on nationwide television that Mary Jean Lacaba, 37, was safe in the hands of a southern military commander and the vice governor of Jolo island, where the trio have been threatened with beheading earlier this week. “She's alive and well,” said Sen. Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross. “I'm really very elated. I'm so happy and had a good cry.” Doctors were checking Lacaba at a Jolo military camp, he said. “I hope we can get the other two,” Gordon added. He said he had received information earlier Thursday that Italian Eugenio Vagni and Swiss Andreas Notter were seen alive, and that one of them was walking with a cane. In the first footage of Lacaba, shown on GMA-7 television, she was being pushed in a wheelchair to a trauma clinic in the Jolo military camp. She was wearing a red headdress and talking on a cell phone. Until Lacaba's release, Red Cross officials were worried taht there was no news on the fate of the three aid workers early on Thursday. Abu Sayyaf miitants had said they would behead one of the trio by March 31, unless troops effectively ceded control of the island of Jolo, where the army has been battling the militants. The military made a partial withdrawal from five towns but refused to go further. The regional operations chief for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Alain Aeschlimann, said they were concerned about the hostages' safety. “We continue to hope that the worst did not happen and will not happen,” Aeschlimann said in an interview posted on the ICRC website. “We have taken note of reports that the kidnappers' threat was not carried out.” Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno said the authorities were trying to reestablish contact with the kidnappers, who he insisted had been prevailed upon by local religious leaders not to carry out their threat. “Our focus is on trying to make sure that these kidnappers will get back in the direction of negotiations,” he told a local television station. Pope Benedict XVI issued a last-minute appeal for the lives of the hostages, as did the governments of Italy and Switzerland. With a population of around 650,000, Jolo is home mainly to Moros or Filipino Muslims in the south of the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines. Puno said the kidnappers are penned in a 15 square-kilometer (5.8 square-mile) area of Jolo. “It is raining hard (there) and they cannot get away too far from that because it is the only source of water in the area,” he added.
