The scare of his life

An engineer of the Light Rail Transit-2 found a grenade at the construction site of the railway station in Manila yesterday as tension ran high in the country following a bomb attack that killed 16 people in a Davao port.

Police said Rey Garcia, LRT-2 project engineer, found the Mark 2 fragmentation grenade, its pin intact, wrapped in newspaper and placed inside a plastic bag at the corner of Recto and Evangelista streets in Sta. Cruz, Manila at around 9:30 a.m. yesterday.

It rolled out of the plastic bag after Garcia kicked it aside, thinking it was a bag of garbage.

"I initially thought it was garbage. I was shocked upon seeing the grenade," Garcia noted. He said he could not imagine what would have happened if the grenade exploded.

Responding lawmen said the grenade would not explode since it was tightly wrapped in masking tape. They brought the grenade to the Western Police District (WPD) headquarters for safekeeping.

"They were about to do some diggings there and there is a concrete fence that encloses the area. No one should have been able to enter that area without the guards’ knowledge, but the guards at the site could not say where it came from," an investigator said.

He said police were still investigating and had no suspects.

Last Wednesday, a bomb blast at a busy wharf in the southern port of Davao killed 16 people and injured around 40 others.

No group has claimed responsibility, but President Arroyo, who arrived in Davao yesterday, ordered a "total war" on terrorists. – with AP