Cotabato bus company unfazed by new attack

COTABATO CITY – The Weena Bus Co. will not suspend operations despite Monday night’s bombing of one of its airconditioned units here, causing injuries to five people and triggering panic in the city.

Extortion syndicates have bombed more than a dozen buses of Weena, which serves the 248-kilometer Cotabato-Davao route, in the past two years.

The attacks were meant to scare the bus company’s management to shell out regular “protection money.”

“We will not stop from plying the Cotabato-Davao route. It’s up to the government to run after these people pestering us,” the company’s owner, Bernardo Valdevieso, told reporters.

Valdevieso said an anonymous caller warned him of more bombings of Weena buses after Monday night’s incident.

The powerful blast occurred as driver Esmael Makakena was maneuvering the bus through the narrow entrance to the Weena terminal here.

Valdevieso said the same caller demanded P1 million in monthly protection money prior to the attack, the second in just a month.

“The caller, who claimed that he was a spokesman of the so-called ‘Hezbollah gang,’ demanded money in exchange for the safe operations of my buses,” Valdevieso said.

“He said that if I will ignore his demand, Weena buses must only serve the Davao-Kabacan route and stop plying the route connecting Kabacan (in North Cotabato) to Cotabato City,” he said.

Also injured in Monday night’s bombing were passengers Mama Kadalum, 39, and Leopoldo Cabanog, 50; security guard Karim Lawan, 40; and bus conductor Nestor Bayog.

The explosion came a day after policemen safely deactivated an improvised explosive device fashioned from a rifle grenade with a mechanical timing mechanism near the town hall of Midsayap in North Cotabato.

Superintendent Chino Mamburam, Midsayap police chief, said the explosive was planted in an open field near the municipal hall, not far away from the office of Mayor Manuel Rabarra.

Last May 8, five people, two of them children, were injured when an improvised explosive went off in a passenger van at the public terminal of Midsayap.

Mamburam said an extortion gang demanding monthly protection money from Rabarra’s office was behind the attack.