EUROPEAN Union Alistair Macdonald on Thursday said the August 23 botched hostage rescue in Manila will not affect investments in the Philippines and it will just be a matter of time for the country to recover from the horrifying incident that badly hit the tourism industry.

“I think that is something that won’t affect the investment perspective. But if you are a tourist and you’re thinking of ‘Shall I go to Bali, shall I go to Phuket, shall I go to Vietnam or shall I come to the Philippines?’ Individuals react to what they see on the television. I’m confident that the Philippines can recover from this individual incident. Steps have been taken and we can see that the steps are effective,” Macdonald, head of the EU delegation to the Philippines, told reporters in an ambush interview after a human-rights forum in Quezon City.

Macdonald, however, declined to comment on the way the police handled the situation.

“I can’t comment on the event itself because the investigation is ongoing, but an event of that nature happening anywhere in the world certainly casts a very dark cloud over the image of that country, whatever it is, when something like that happens.”

“But it happened here in the Philippines, and I think it was tragic. I gathered that steps are going to be taken to make sure that kind of situation will [not happen] again. [We] look forward to hearing the results of the investigation,” he said.

The televised hostage-taking took the lives of five Hong Kong residents and three Canadians with Chinese origins. The hostage-taker, dismissed Senior Insp. Rolando Mendoza, was killed by snipers’ bullets from the Special Weapons and Tactics of the Philippine National Police (PNP).

The way the PNP handled the hostage drama that ran for 12 hours gathered criticisms and ridicule from the international community, most especially from Hong Kong and China.

Macdonald said such incident could have happened anywhere in the world, but this does not matter much in terms of investments.

“There have been tragic incidents in other countries also. I don’t think investors react to an individual case. I don’t think there was any particular impact there but the ongoing perception of a country where violence happened is something, which is certainly discouraging. It is not an individual case which produces that result,” he said.