John Ridsdel’s friend warns militant group they’re bound to die

The militant group that beheaded a former Calgary man in the Philippines should have been more careful. The warning is coming from a friend of John Ridsdel, a mining executing who was captured by Abu Sayyaf in September along with three other hostages.

sellers

He was held for ransom until last Monday when he was beheaded. Alexandra Sellers posted a letter to Ridsdel’s attackers on her blog Saturday morning. She explains Ridsdel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and if he wasn’t on medication, he would have been contagious at the time he was being held.

“Did he cough and sneeze during those seven months when you held him prisoner and so bravely stood over him with guns and machetes—father of executioners that you are—when you brutalized him? Did you care? No? But you should have cared. Even if you never came nearer to him than to bathe your hands in his blood when you murdered him, you should care. Because everyone who breathed near him now has the bacteria in their lungs. And sooner or later, one in ten will develop the disease.”

Sellers writes about how she was a childhood friend of Ridsdel’s, who reconnected with him years later. She calls him a good man, generous of spirit with an often self-deprecating humour.

“What a life he had led! So full of travel and adventure and courage and daring! Not much left on my bucket list, he said. He had visited, lived and worked in so many countries, so many dangerous and beautiful places,” she writes.

Ridsdel, fellow Canadian Robert Hall, a Norwegian man and a Filipino woman were believed to be held in Jolo Island in Sulu, where the militants are thought to be holding a number of captives.

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