By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

April 13, 2001

After nearly eight months of threatened beheadings, violent clashes with soldiers and bouts with illness, an Oakland man who Muslim rebels snatched in the Philippines was rescued late Wednesday night during a deadly military assault.

Jeffrey Schilling, 25, was in good health after an elite marine force plucked him from the Abu Sayyaf camp in the town of Luuk, on Jolo island during a daytime raid that claimed the life of at least four rebels, officials said. He was taken to a Jolo City military hospital where doctors gave him a clean bill of health after a preliminary examination, said U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Anderson in a telephone interview from Manila.

“He’s safely out and in pretty good shape after being held for almost eight months,” Anderson said. “He is still on Jolo, but we expect him to come up to Manila or possibly to see the president today or tomorrow. Then the plan is to get him home as soon as possible … quickly.”

Carol Schilling, who one week ago rushed to Manila to plead for her only child’s life, was all smiles and giddy Thursday as she hugged friends and chatted with reporters at her Oakland apartment. News of her son’s daring rescue came with a phone call from embassy official John Caulfield that woke her at 3:35 a.m., she said.

“I knew that it had to do with Jeffrey,” Schilling said. “I was hoping it was good news. I was very thrilled to hear the good news.”

Surviving on only a few hours sleep like many of the 226 nights since her “gentle giant” was kidnapped, Schilling openly hoped her son would finally return home this weekend.

“That’s when I’ll probably break down into tears, when I get a chance to tell him I love him,” she said. “I’m looking forward to giving him some hugs. And, you know, I’m revoking his passport.”

She had not spoken to her son since his impromptu return to safety, a streak that has stretched to present from Sept. 21 when a Philippine radio station called with Jeffrey Schilling on the line from a jungle encampment.

The rebel group’s hideout was one of multiple makeshift prisons Schilling spent time in since he was abducted Aug. 28 in Zamboanga during a visit to the group with his new bride Ivy Osani, a cousin of Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya. It was not clear why he went to the camp, but the reason behind the kidnapping certainly was, Carol Schilling said Thursday.

“He was an American,” she said flatly. “Americans of all levels are worth something to kidnappers all around the world.”

The strange circumstances of his kidnapping led some military officials to speculate that Schilling might have been cooperating with the rebels. The rebels themselves accused Schilling of being a CIA agent, a charge U.S. government officials dismissed as preposterous.

The smallest of three major insurgency groups in the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf shot to international notoriety last year after seizing dozens of hostages, many of them foreigners, in bold invasions. It released all but two — Schilling and Roland Ulla, a Filipino worker at a scuba diving resort — for reported multimillion-dollar ransoms.

A demand from the group came a day after the kidnapping when rebels threatened to kill their hostage if the United States did not release three Islamic prisoners. Maintaining its policy to not negotiate with hostage-takers, the U.S. government kept the prisoners locked up.

Schilling was not executed, a precedent that would ring true time and again as the months passed and the Philippine government grew more impatient. Government officials vowed never to pay the $10 million price tag the rebels had placed on Schilling.

Military assaults on the Abu Sayyaf first launched in September continued into the new year, growing more violent and deadly mainly for the rebel group. Seven Abu Sayyaf guerrillas have been killed in the last week and a half alone, military officials have said.

Last week, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared an “all-out war” on the Abu Sayyaf after its leaders, like it had in the days following his kidnapping, threatened to behead Schilling and send it to Arroyo as a birthday gift.

Carol Schilling boarded a plane for Manila in hopes of persuading the group to again spare his life before their Thursday night deadline. The Abu Sayyaf relented, but the Philippine government did not.

After hopscotching for months around Jolo with Schilling in tow just ahead of the soldiers who persued them, Abu Sayyaf was again tracked down. On Wednesday, during one of the holiest weeks in the island country, Schilling was finally rescued.

“Right now the fact that he’s OK is the big thing,” said Valarie Revels, a longtime friend of Carol Schilling and a “second mother” to her son. “I always believed he would be released. It was hard there for a while, but I always suspectd it would come out OK.”