North Cotabato blast: 1 dead, 8 wounded

COTABATO CITY — A barangay chairman was killed and eight others were seriously wounded in a grenade blast at a busy intersection in Kabacan, North Cotabato Monday night.

Senior Inspector Abello Junggaya, Kabacan police chief, said the fatality, Hermie Guzman, chairman of a densely populated barangay in the town proper, was whiling away his time, along with several bystanders, at a roadside barbecue stand when one of two motorcycle-riding men who pulled over across the street tossed an M67 fragmentation grenade at them and then sped away.

The explosion wounded Guzman’s nephew Herlo and Claudio Macaya, both incumbent barangay officials; Marlowe Bulong, Dick Abellera, Cesar Domingo, Hernani Jimenez, Celestino Pacete and a certain Voltaire.

Junggaya said they still have no solid clues on the attack.

"Initially, our theory is that it was the slain barangay chairman who was the real target of the bombing," he said.

In another incident, patrolling policemen foiled an attempt by four men to set on fire a wooden bailey bridge in Cotabato City last Monday night.

Police said they are now verifying if the four arrested suspects, identified as Anwar Guimbangan, 17; Khalil Ibrahim, 22; Kaharudin Karim, 17; and Nabil Ali, 23, belong to the special operations group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Vendetta killings have long hounded Kabacan, involving local leaders and members of clans locked in political disputes.

Since the early 1990s, more than 20 Kabacan politicians, among them a vice mayor, Karutin Makalipat, have been killed either by suspected guns-for-hire and in bomb attacks even in busy areas of the municipality.

Key military sources in North Cotabato said it could also be possible that the MILF was responsible for Monday night’s grenade attack in the Kabacan town proper.

Sources said Guzman was known for having supported the police-military’s campaign against marauding secessionist forces operating in Kabacan and surrounding towns.

The grenade attack came just two days after Army and police explosives experts safely defused a homemade bomb left by suspected MILF rebels in a populated area in Pigkawayan town, also in North Cotabato.

Police investigators in Pigkawayan, some 40 kilometers north of the command headquarters here of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said the bomb, fashioned from a live 81-mm mortar projectile rigged with a time-delayed blasting mechanism, was left near the entrance of a videoke pub and was first found by children playing around.

Responding policemen and bomb experts managed to deactivate the bomb before it could explode.