Cops slug it out with MILF rebels

COTABATO CITY – Policemen in Pikit, North Cotabato clashed yesterday with followers of renegade Moro Islamic Liberation Front Commander Ameril Umbra Kato they caught red-handed stealing water buffaloes.

Senior Inspector Elias Dandan, municipal police chief of Pikit, said the rebels, led by Datukan Samad, a known henchman of Kato, fled to different directions leaving the four farm animals that have just been untied from makeshift barns of poor Muslim villagers at a farming enclave near the Liguasan Marsh.

Samad is one of more than a dozen MILF commanders, who, along with Kato, were charged with criminal offenses and violation of the Human Security Act for their involvement in last month’s harassments of more than a dozen farming villages at the tri-boundaries of North Cotabato’s Aleosan, Midsayap and Pikit towns.

The group burned more than a hundred houses in the villages they took over and occupied for three weeks, and carted away more than a hundred water buffaloes and cows farmers have left when they were forced to leave their farms at gunpoint.

Dandan said the escape route of Samad and his followers were stained heavily with blood, indicating some of them were wounded in the ensuing firefight.

Samad has allegedly more or less 100 men operating in Barangay Balongis and nearby villages in Takepan, Nalapaan, and Lidtongan, all in Pikit.  

“The lawless group is not only engaged in cattle rustling but they’re also into kidnapping, motorcycle theft, and highway robberies,” Dandan said.

 A local court has earlier issued a warrant for Samad’s arrest for masterminding the kidnapping in 2007 of a German treasure hunter, Thomas Walraff, in a remote barangay in Pikit.

In another development, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao police is now preparing criminal charges against another follower of Kato, Commander Bonnie Ayunan, and his men for robbing relief workers of 60 bags of rice while on their way to an evacuation site in Mamasapano, Maguindanao last Friday.

Superintendent Danilo Bacas, spokesman of the ARMM police, said lawmen in Mamasapano have started documenting how Ayunan and his men, at gunpoint, blocked a team of relief workers on their way to Barangay Libutan in the same town and robbed them of 60 bags of rice intended for evacuees.