Cops still clueless on Cotabato City bombers' identities

COTABATO City, Philippines - Investigators are still clueless on the identity of the two men who tried to bomb a truck full of soldiers along Sinsuat Avenue here on Thursday night.

Two passersby, Cristel Uy and Leslie Encina, were injured in the blast, which occurred four days after a student was killed and 15 others were hurt in an explosion in Kabacan, North Cotabato.

Witnesses insinuated, however, that one of the passengers of the Army truck could have accidentally fired a 40-millimeter projectile from a tube of an M203 rifle, causing the explosive round to explode on the ground.

Local police investigators had insisted that one of the two bombers, who were riding a motorcycle together, hurled a mortar priming fuse on the Army truck, whose uniformed passengers managed to promptly drop the explosive device at one side of the thoroughfare, where it went off.

A mortar priming device is a miniature explosive attached on tips of a 60- or 81-millimeter round, designed to ignite a projectile's combustible powder once it slams on the ground after having been launched from a tube.

The soldiers, who belong to a component unit of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, were on their way to Parang town in northwest of Maguindanao.

Uy and Encina, who sustained shrapnel wounds, are now undergoing medication at the Cotabato Regional Medical Center.

Captain Joan Pitinglay, public affairs chief of 6th Infantry Division, said no one from among the passengers of the military truck was hurt.

The incident was preceded by Sunday’s bomb explosion in Kabacan town in North Cotabato, which killed a student named Monique Mantawil and injured 15 others.

North Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza and Kabacan’s incumbent chief executive Mayor Herlo Guzman have offered P100,000 each as bounty in exchange for any information that would lead to the arrest of the bombers.