The police forces are gathering information to pinpoint the hide-out of a group of Abu Sayyaf militants who abducted a Chinese hostage five days ago, a senior police commander in southern Philippines said Wednesday.

Senior Superintendent Jularisim Kasim, police chief of Sulu province, told Xinhua that his men have yet got a clue on where the abductors and the hostage are because the group is "highly mobilized and very experienced in abduction."

"We are still searching but we will exhaust all peaceful means for the hostage's safety concerns," Kasim said in a telephone interview.

He said the victim, a certain Peter Go, 19, was kidnapped at a shore where he worked in Jolo city of Sulu on last Friday by at least six armed men, allegedly members of the Abu Sayyaf rebel group.

A Chinese diplomat based in the central city of Cebu, whose office's jurisdiction covers the Visayas and Mindanao region, confirmed that the kidnapped victim is a Chinese, who comes from the southeastern Fujian province, the hometown of the majority of the Chinese immigrants here in the Philippines.

"We have not got sufficient data on the victim's personal information, but we will closely follow the rescue operations and try to contact the victim's family and his employer in Jolo as soon as possible," Yang Fengwu, consul with the Chinese General Consulate in Cebu, told Xinhua over phone in Mandarin.

(Xinhua News Agency December 17, 2008)