Jesus Dureza, a senior aide to President Rodrigo Duterte, said the two hostages were freed in Sulu, a remote archipelago known as a militant hideout.
In October, the Philippine military said armed men identifying themselves as Abu Sayyaf militants kidnapped the pair from a South Korean cargo ship, the first such attack on a large merchant vessel.
The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, and has earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.
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