North Cotabato university building torched

COTABATO CITY — Hooded men set on fire the two-story agriculture building of the University of Southern Mindanao (USM) in Kabacan, North Cotabato over the weekend.

The incident occurred just a year after the burning of the building of the school’s College of Veterinary Medicine, which has yet to be solved.

The USM administration has called on Interior and Local Government Secretary Jose Lina to create a special group of experts from the Bureau of Fire Protection and the Philippine National Police to probe the blaze and prosecute the people responsible for it.

Fire probers in Kabacan, 90 kilometers north of this city, said there were indications that the arsonists used incendiary chemicals in setting the agriculture building ablaze.

Two Muslim students, whose names have been withheld for security reasons, said they saw pistol-wielding men wearing ski masks suspiciously roaming around the building before it caught fire.

Responding firemen recovered two live fragmentation grenades at the fire scene, believed to have been left by the arsonists to inflict harm on firefighters.

The grenades, however, failed to explode and bomb experts succeeded in immediately defusing them. — John Unson