Board of Inquiry visits Mamasapano clash site

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines - Members of the government’s Board of Inquiry (BOI) on Tuesday toured the scenes of the January 25 deadly clashes between policemen and Moro rebels in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

Hundreds of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) guerillas in combat gears were positioned in banana farms about 200 meters away while BOI officials inspected the sites of the police-MILF encounters in Barangay Tukanalipao in Mamasapano.

The chair of the BOI, Police Director Benjamin Magalong of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, told reporters their main objective of inspecting the surroundings of Barangay Tukanalipao is to determine the factors that influenced how the Special Action Force (SAF) operatives carried out their mission to neutralize Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, also known as Marwan.

The SAF-MILF encounters last January 25 in Mamasapano’s adjoining Barangays Tukanalipao, Pidsandawan and Inog-og left 44 policemen, 18 rebels and five civilians dead.

Magalong said they also need to establish how officers of the SAF teams that raided Marwan’s hideout in Barangay Inog-og executed their “judgement call” while fighting an overwhelming number of rebels that attacked them while maneuvering out of the area where they had killed the Malaysian bomb maker.

Magalong said it appeared there were lapses in the execution of the SAF’s operation plan on how to get Marwan and his ethnic Maguindanaon cohort, the foreign-trained bomber Abdulbasit Usman, the main targets of the January 25 raid at Barangay Inog-og.

The retreating SAF men were attacked from different directions, as they marched out of Barangay Inog-og, by local MILF guerillas and a third group, the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF).

BIFF gunmen had killed 10 SAF members in the ensuing firefights and carted away their firearms as they escaped toward the border of Mamasapano and Salibo town, also in the second district of Maguindanao.

Magalong said some of the SAF teams may have been deployed in wrong spots while their companions raided the adjoining houses of Marwan and Usman.

He said they their actual inspection of the scenes of the SAF-MILF encounter is the last phase of their investigation on the incident.

“We were given one month to finish the investigation,” Magalong told reporters.

Magalong also had a brief talk with the barangay chairman of Tukanalipao, Esmael Hashim, and Mamasapano Mayor Benzar Ampatuan, who both briefed him on how they helped extricate the cadavers of the SAF members killed in the firefights.

Some 200 policemen led by Maguindanao’s police director, Senior Supt. Rudelio Jocson, and his immediate superior, Senior Supt.  Noel Armilla, acting director of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao police, provided security for Magalong and his companions from the national headquarters of the Philippine National Police as they moved around Mamasapano.

Armilla said the tour of Magalong and other members of the BOI in Mamasapano was properly coordinated with the government’s Coordinating Committee on the Cessation of Hostilities.

“The MILF was made to understand that the activity is administrative in nature, not tactical. We ought to thank the local government unit of Mamasapano for helping us out,” Armilla said.

Local officials said the MILF did not object to the site inspection, but requested that the areas Magalong and his companions were to inspect be secured only by policemen, not by Army combatants.