PARIS?A police assault on a bus of tourists taken hostage in the Philippines on Monday was ?badly prepared and risky,? a French expert said, after eight hostages and the gunman were killed.
The policemen who stormed the bus in Manila did not have special training and ?visibly lacked adequate equipment and tactical competence,? said Frederic Gallois, who once commanded France?s elite hostage rescue unit.
After seeing live television images of the operation, the former colonel told Agence France Presse that ?one cannot understand what justified this badly prepared and risky assault.?
The Manila policemen, for example, did not attempt a surprise tactic like entering the bus at several points and had also stayed too long outside the vehicle before launching their assault, he said.
Gallois was the commander of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group between 2002 and 2007.
The unit in 1994 freed 173 passengers and crew from a plane hijacked by four Algerian Islamists, who were killed in the operation.
?The fact that there was essentially live video was mistake No. 1,? said assistant professor John Harrison, a homeland security analyst at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
He said there should have been a media blackout to deny the hijacker feedback on what was going on around him.
Instead, he was able to follow events, including frenzied speculation by serving and former police chiefs appearing on Philippine networks, via the bus? internal TV.
Dennis Wong Sing Wing, an associate professor of applied social studies at City University in Hong Kong, said the police operation was ?really shocking? to watch as it unfolded live on TV.
?I am very angry about their unprofessional performance,? he said. ?They are indirectly responsible for the deaths of the Hong Kong people.?
Wong said the policemen assigned to end the hostage taking appeared to lack modern weapons and communication equipment, and as a result were hesitant to attack the gunman, who was armed with an M-16 assault rifle.
He criticized the negotiating tactics employed by the Manila policemen, saying they failed to calm the hostage-taker down and hear him out.
