Matanog mayor survives ambush

COTABATO CITY — Suspected partisans ambushed yesterday at a secluded stretch of the Secretary Narciso Ramos Highway the mayor of Matanog town in Maguindanao, killing one of his escorts and wounding five others.

Matanog Mayor Nasser Imam, who belongs to an influential political clan in his town, survived the attack unscathed.

Col. Tereso Badayos, commanding officer of the 7th Marine Battalion Landing Team, said Imam was on his way, along with about a dozen escorts, to the town proper of Matanog when the ambushers, positioned along the highway in Barangay Pinantao, also in the same town, opened fire with assault rifles. One of Imam’s security escorts, Suwaib Madag, was killed in the initial volley of fire, which also left five others, Omar Sumray, Solaiman Dipatuan, Orting Tolino, Yasser Bangon, Ibrahim Sumakan, seriously wounded.

Imam and his wounded escorts rode in one vehicle, an Isuzu mini-truck, which the ambushers crippled with B-40 rockets and shoulder-fired M-79 grenades. Imam’s other body guards, two of them Marine combatants, who were trailing the mayor on board two other vehicles, managed to return fire and succeeded in driving the ambushers away after a 10-minute firefight.

"It was Allah’s will that I survived the ambush despite the heavy volume of fire that hit my vehicle. The ambushers were firing at will, recklessly," Imam said.

Barangay officials in Pinantao, among them Islamic preachers, said two of Imam’s ambushers were killed while three others, one of them an adolescent, were wounded in the ensuring skirmishes. — John Unson