5 dead in clan shootout in Shariff Kabunsuan

COTABATO CITY – Five people were killed as two rival Muslim families – one identified with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the other with the Moro National Liberation Front – clashed in Shariff Aguak yesterday, breaking an informal truce brokered by local leaders last month.

Superintendent Danilo Bacas, spokesman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) police, said barangay officials in Laguitan, a coastal area in Shariff Kabunsuan’s Datu Blah town, have confirmed that five people have been killed in the renewed hostilities between the supposedly related Minalang and Tabunaway families.

Some members of the Minalang family belong to the MILF while the Tabunaways are either members or supporters of the MNLF.

The two families are squabbling for control of patches of lands in a coastal district at the border of the neighboring Shariff Kabunsuan and Sultan Kudarat provinces.

Yesterday’s hostilities between the two families, which both have arsenals of military-type assault rifles, erupted when armed members of one family showed force at the other’s territory, sparking a two-hour firefight.

The Minalangs and the Tabunaways figured in more than a dozen encounters from 2006 to February this year, hostilities that left more than a dozen fatalities on each side.

Leaders of the two families agreed to reconcile the traditional way last March through the efforts of local officials led by Datu Blah Mayor Manaut Sinsuat, chairman of the municipal peace and order council.

Bacas said their regional director, Chief Superintendent Joel Goltiao, has ordered an investigation on who between the Minalangs and the Tabunaways could have violated a truce leaders of both clans signed last month.

Bacas said Goltiao deployed members of the ARMM’s Regional Mobile Group to Barangay Laguitan to help local leaders pacify the feuding families.  – John Unson