Manila, Philippines Philippine police officials said Thursday they were checking reports that a kidnapped American died after being shot twice while resisting his Oct. 17 kidnapping by gunmen in the country’s south. Elliot EastmanThe 26-year-old from Vermont was shot twice with an M16 rifle as he tried to fend off his four captors, who posed as police officers, in the coastal town of Sibuco in Zamboanga del Norte province, police said.
The kidnappers dragged him to a motorboat and fled, according to previous police reports.
A massive search for Eastman and his captors led to the arrest of several suspects, but he has not been found. Three suspects were killed in a shootout with police in the south last month.
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Regional police spokesman Lt. Col. Ramoncelio Sawan said investigators received information from a relative of one of the suspects that Eastman died as a result of gunshot wounds to the thigh and abdomen while being taken by his captors. The kidnappers decided to throw his body into the sea after his death, the relative said.
The information about Eastman’s death was later confirmed by a prime suspect in the kidnapping who was recently arrested, and his affidavit was submitted to prosecutors, Sawan said. Criminal complaints of kidnapping have been filed against several suspects, he said.
“We are forced to believe that he has died. All information we have points to that,” Sawan said. But he added that without the victim’s body, “we still leave a little bit of hope that this may not be the case” and that police would continue investigating.
Philippine police informed Eastman’s Philippine wife and the U.S. Embassy in Manila about his reported death, Sawan said.
The embassy said it was aware of the police report and was cooperating with the Philippine authorities, but did not comment further due to privacy concerns.
Eastman left the Philippines and was returning to Sibuco to attend his wife’s graduation ceremony when he was kidnapped. He had posted YouTube and Facebook videos about his life in Sibuco, a poor, remote coastal town, where the suspects saw him, police previously said.
They said the suspects appeared to be common criminals who did not belong to an Islamist rebel group that has been accused of kidnappings for ransom in the past.
Security concerns have long haunted the southern Philippines, home to a Muslim minority in the largely Roman Catholic country.
The southern third of the Philippines has abundant resources but has long been crippled by poverty, insurgency and bandits.
On his YouTube page, Eastman said he came to the Philippines and met “the love of my life deep in the mountains” of Zamboanga del Norte, which he said he would explore to offer followers a glimpse of “the daily life as the first and only foreigner” to permanently settle in the remote region.
A 2014 peace deal between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the largest of several Islamist separatist groups, has significantly eased widespread fighting in the south. Ruthless military offensives have weakened smaller armed groups like Abu Sayyaf, reducing kidnappings, bombings and other violence.
The Abu Sayyaf has targeted Americans and other Western tourists and missionaries, most of whom were released after ransoms were paid. Several were killed, including American Guillermo Sobero, who was beheaded on the southern island of Basilan, and an American missionary, Martin Burnham, who was killed while Philippine forces tried to rescue him and his wife, Gracia Burnham, in 2002. a rainforest near Sibuco.
