Grenade blasts welcome new Mindanao university president

NORTH COTABATO - Investigators believe that the grenade explosions that rocked the state-run University of Southern Mindanao (USM) in Kabacan town Thursday night is related to the assumption of its new president.

The bombers blasted one after another two fragmentation grenades near a motorpool inside the campus, four hours after Francisco Gil Garcia assumed as president of the controversial USM.

Garcia took over from lawyer Christopher Cabilen, who was installed as caretaker of the university last year following the bloody squabbles for its presidency by influential contenders.

Sources from the USM said there are groups grooming certain candidates for the school presidency.

Garcia reportedly won in the selection of aspirants for the USM presidency by the school’s Board of Regents, whose members include representatives from the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education.

Still unidentified bombers set off grenades and improvised explosives inside the USM campus at the town proper of Kabacan in more than a dozen attacks in the past three years.

Superintendent Jordine Maribojo, chief of the Kabacan municipal police, said no one was killed or hurt in the latest bombing inside the USM campus.

“Let’s give investigators enough time to wind up with their investigation on the incident,” Maribojo said.

The USM last hogged the headlines in the middle of 2013 when its former president, the recalcitrant Jesus Derije, refused to vacate his post despite clamors by students and faculty members, who were critical of his alleged mismanagement of the school.

Derije, who is facing graft cases at the Ombudsman, stepped down and relinquished his post to Cabilen, through the intervention of North Cotabato Gov. Emmlylou Taliño-Mendoza.

The spate of violent incidents at the USM campus prompted Mendoza, presiding chairperson of the provincial peace and order council, to intervene to stave off escalation of hostilities between Derije’s camp and the groups that had wanted him booted out.