New crime groups emerge from Pentagon

COTABATO CITY — Apart from smaller, independent kidnap gangs, more than a dozen smaller extortion rings of the notorious Pentagon kidnapping syndicate have also emerged following last month’s death of its chieftain, Faisal Marohombsar, local residents and religious leaders in Central Mindanao said.

Various sectors in the region blame the lackluster police performance in failing to update the order of battle for members of the new extortion rings and in its supposed role of neutralizing the new groups of the dreaded kidnap-for-ransom syndicate.

Businessmen in Maguindanao, some of them members of the Chinese community, have confirmed receiving recent extortion letters signed by people unknown to them.

"And most of the letters stated that they belong to the Pentagon," a Chinese copra trader in nearby Sultan Kudarat province told The STAR.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said the extortionists have threatened to abduct them if they ignore their demand for a monthly protection money.

The Wenna Bus Company, the lone bus company plying the Cotabato-Davao route, is among the local firms that have recently been subjected to bomb attacks by extortionists identified with the Pentagon.

Army Major Julieto Ando, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said for two weeks now, their intelligence units have been helping the police identify the new extortion rings reportedly operating under the aegis of the Pentagon.

Highly-placed sources told The STAR that apart from the Pentagon’s the so-called Suicide Bombers Team and Dragon Group, which claimed responsibility for recent bomb attacks in business establishments in the Central Mindanao, two other smaller gangs, the Diamond and Robin Hood, have also been preying on small-scale traders in far-flung areas in the Maguindanao, North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat and Tacurong City.

A Muslim grains trader, who received an extortion letter from the Diamond Gang, said the group’s alleged leader, a certain Shamier, had threatened to burn one of his trucks used in hauling his stocks to Davao City if he will refuse to pay them a P10,000 monthly protection money.

The Diamond and Robin Hood groups, according to a source from Tacurong City, is composed of disgruntled Moro rebels and loyal followers of jailed former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Gov. Nur Misuari.

Members of the Pentagon’s Suicide Bombers Team blasted two fragmentation grenades at the operations center of the WG&A shipping company in nearby Sultan Kudarat town of Maguindanao last week, wounding two of the firm’s security guards.

Sultan Kudarat’s police probers identified the wounded security guards of the WG&A as Felino Maguate and Salvador Cortez.