The decision to take the Australian-based New Zealand archaeologist Prof Bryce Barker and his research team hostage near remote Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea was a “spur of the moment” decision by their captors, two of whom had been shot in an earlier encounter with security guards at a logging site. The governor of Hela province, Philip Undialu, said his team had only been able to begin negotiations with the captors – a criminal gang of…
