Local officials condemn deadly NPA attack

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines - Local officials on Thursday took turns condemning Monday’s deadly attacks by the New People’s Army (NPA) in the province that left nine government combatants dead.

Six soldiers were wounded in the two incidents, now confined in different hospitals.

Gov. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza branded as “cowardly” the use by the NPAs of supposedly banned roadside bombs as they waylaid two groups of soldiers in separate attacks in the adjoining Tulunan and Makilala towns.

“That was inhumane, too,” said Mendoza, presiding chairperson of the provincial peace and order council.

Army combatants and local members of the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit (CAFGU) have still been running after the NPAs that killed in an ambush four soldiers and three militiamen in Barangay Bituan in Tulunan town, and the group that bombed a convoy of government combatants in Barangay Luna Sur in Makilala while on its way to check on the ambush incident.

The roadside bombing in Makilala left a member of the Army’s 57th Infantry Battalion dead and four others wounded, among them 1Lt. Bruno Hugo.

“These atrocities being perpetrated by the NPAs in the province are `anti-people’ because it’s the innocent people, the non-combatants that suffer most from the brunt of these wanton attacks,” Mendoza said.

Lt. Col. Roy Galido, commanding officer of the Army’s 38th Infantry Battalion, which has jurisdiction over CAFGUs in Central Mindanao, said the troops the NPAs ambushed in Tulunan were to deliver subsistence allowance to militiamen assigned in a detachment in a farming enclave in Barangay Bituan.

The light Kia 4x4 truck carrying the victims was maneuvering through an uphill stretch of the road connecting the town proper of Tulunan to Barangay Bituan when the NPAs set off a roadside bomb and opened fire with assault rifles.

Five soldiers and three CAFGU members were killed in the shooting frenzy.

Two soldiers, one of them an officer, Captain Ernesto Aguilar of the 38 IB, were wounded in the attack.

The municipal peace and order councils of Makilala and Tulunan, both located in the second district of the province, also condemned the separate attacks the NPAs perpetrated one after another last Monday.

Mendoza said the provincial government, the Philippine National Police, and the military remain in control and are now initiating measures to prevent a repeat of the atrocities instigated by NPAs.