A professor from New Zealand and two other hostages have been freed in Papua New Guinea, the country's Prime Minister said on Sunday, a week after they were kidnapped by an armed group in the country's rugged highlands.
"It took us a while but the last three have been successfully returned," Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said.
The hostages were among four people kidnapped in a densely forested region last Sunday. One woman, a Papua New Guinea citizen, was freed on Wednesday.
National Police Commissioner David Manning said at the time that “from the information that we have received, the remaining three captives are in reasonable health".
The New Zealand hostage lives and works in Australia as a university professor, police said, while the other two people held were reported to be local university students.
The group's captors initially issued a ransom demand of roughly $1 million — an enormous sum in one of the Pacific region's poorest nations — before lowering the figure and abandoning a 24-hour deadline.
Mr Marape had urged the kidnappers to free the hostages, saying more than 13 of them had already been identified.
“You have nowhere to hide. All of you and your names and your faces are being profiled as we speak,” he said.
Papua New Guinea's highlands are a sprawling expanse of jungle-cloaked hills where the central government and security forces have little sway.
In recent years, the region has seen an increase in violence among rival groups and an influx of weapons.
Kidnapping for ransom is an uncommon crime in Papua New Guinea, a tribal society of nine million people who are mostly subsistence farmers.
With reporting from agencies
Who are the Sacklers?
The Sackler family is a transatlantic dynasty that owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and markets OxyContin, one of the drugs at the centre of America's opioids crisis. The family is well known for their generous philanthropy towards the world's top cultural institutions, including Guggenheim Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate in Britain, Yale University and the Serpentine Gallery, to name a few. Two branches of the family control Purdue Pharma.
Isaac Sackler and Sophie Greenberg were Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York before the First World War. They had three sons. The first, Arthur, died before OxyContin was invented. The second, Mortimer, who died aged 93 in 2010, was a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma. The third, Raymond, died aged 97 in 2017 and was also a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma.
It was Arthur, a psychiatrist and pharmaceutical marketeer, who started the family business dynasty. He and his brothers bought a small company called Purdue Frederick; among their first products were laxatives and prescription earwax remover.
Arthur's branch of the family has not been involved in Purdue for many years and his daughter, Elizabeth, has spoken out against it, saying the company's role in America's drugs crisis is "morally abhorrent".
The lawsuits that were brought by the attorneys general of New York and Massachussetts named eight Sacklers. This includes Kathe, Mortimer, Richard, Jonathan and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, who are all the children of either Mortimer or Raymond. Then there's Theresa Sackler, who is Mortimer senior's widow; Beverly, Raymond's widow; and David Sackler, Raymond's grandson.
Members of the Sackler family are rarely seen in public.
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The Perfect Couple
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Jack Reynor
Creator: Jenna Lamia
Rating: 3/5
Company name: Farmin
Date started: March 2019
Founder: Dr Ali Al Hammadi
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: AgriTech
Initial investment: None to date
Partners/Incubators: UAE Space Agency/Krypto Labs
The National Archives, Abu Dhabi
Founded over 50 years ago, the National Archives collects valuable historical material relating to the UAE, and is the oldest and richest archive relating to the Arabian Gulf.
Much of the material can be viewed on line at the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive - https://www.agda.ae/en
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