Bounty on BIFF leaders urged

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines- The Army’s 6th Infantry Division on Tuesday asked the Department of Interior and Local Government and the Philippine National Police to put up rewards  for the capture of wanted leaders of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters.

Col. Dickson Hermoso, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said even the closest relatives of BIFF leaders would be tempted to help the police arrest the bandits once they carry bounties on their heads.

“But we can only recommend because the final say on... the bounties for the capture of wanted people comes from the DILG, the PNP and from Malacañang,” Hermoso said.

Hermoso said policemen and soldiers, as a rule, are not entitled to any reward if they arrest any wanted person with a bounty on the head.

“Appropriate bounties could be a `carrot’ that we can dangle to entice the friends, relatives, and the barangay folks in areas where these wanted BIFF leaders hide to provide the police with information that would lead to their arrest,” Hermoso said.

The BIFF’s founder, Saudi-trained cleric Imam Ameril Ombra Kato, and more than a dozen of his lieutenants, among them Karialan and Tambako, also both Islamic preachers, have  long been wanted for multiple murders, frustrated murders, arson, robbery, and for the plunder of  villages the BIFF had attacked in the past two years.

Kato began as chief of the 105th Base Command of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but was booted out in late 2010 for insubordination and irreconcilable differences with the MILF’s leadership.

Kato, who studied Islamic theology in a religious school in Saudi Arabia as a government scholar in the early 1970s, launched the BIFF in early 2011.

The BIFF has since been  hogging the headlines for banditry and its cruelty.

The BIFF is also despised for its excessive mulcting of “protection money” from peasant communities.

Sources from the BIFF said Karialan  is now is overseeing the group, with imprimatur from Kato, after the latter suffered stroke and became physically incapacitated in late 2011.

Combined combatants of the Army’s 601st and 1st Mechanized Brigades took over the BIFF’s largest enclave in Barangay Ganta in Shariff Saidona town in the second district of the province  Friday, after a five-day operation precipitated by bombings and attacks on farming enclaves the group perpetrated in recent months.

Hermoso said Karialan and his subordinate-commanders have escaped even before soldiers could reach their camp in Barangay Ganta.

“There is a need to raise rewards for the capture of this people. Certainly, with rewards being dangled, even the closest of their relatives will not hesitate to turn them in,” Hermoso said. - John Unson