A plastic bag turned up in Jolo, in the southern Philippines, holding the head of John Ridsdel. A Canadian from Calgary, he had been held by Abu Sayyaf gunmen for seven months. The ransom deadline had run out on April 25, 2016, and the group apparently killed him then.
Villagers later found a headless body, possibly his, by a creek bed near Talipao. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened an international murder investigation.
The kidnapping happened on September 21, 2015. Gunmen raided the Holiday Ocean View Samal Resort on Samal Island, disarmed the guards and took four people: Ridsdel, fellow Canadian Robert Hall, the resort’s Norwegian marina manager Kjartan Sekkingstad, and a Filipino woman, Teresita Flor.
The kidnappers later set a price of 300 million pesos, around $6.5 million, for each of the three foreigners. Bob Rae, a Canadian member of Parliament and a close friend of Ridsdel, said: “The numbers being bandied about were in the millions and millions of dollars and none of the families involved had that kind of cash.”
A career in print and oil
Ridsdel was born in England on September 9, 1947, to a Scottish-born nurse and a London physician. The family moved between Durban, Saskatchewan and Britain before settling in Vancouver and then Calgary.
He went to Upper Canada College in Toronto, then took a political science degree at the University of Toronto and a master’s in political sociology at the London School of Economics. His first jobs were as a producer and reporter at CBC Calgary and at the Calgary Herald. Later he joined Petro-Canada, which sent him to Pakistan, Myanmar and Algeria.
Before retiring he worked for TVI Resource Development Philippines, a subsidiary of Canada’s TVI Pacific, where he also served as a consultant.
Later that year the Toronto Star ran an eight-part series, “Held Hostage,” from November 30 to December 7, 2016. It looked at what really happens when a Canadian is taken hostage abroad, and the paper found “a system ripe for overhaul.”
