MAGUINDANAO, Philippines — Officials on Monday condemned the October 31 fatal ambush in Datu Odin town of a couple working for the Cotabato City local government unit, the second deadly highway attack in the municipality in two weeks.
Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu said he directed the provincial police director, Senior Superintendent Nixon Muksan, to enlist the help of religious and traditional leaders in identifying the killers of George Busque and spouse Malu in a daring attack at the SPDA Village in Datu Odin town.
"I condemn that barbaric act. The Maguindanao provincial police will run after the ambushers," Mangudadatu on Monday told reporters via text message.
Busque was a retired personnel officer of the Cotabato City LGU. He continued to work as adviser on human resources management to the city government after his retirement two years ago.
The wife of Busque was chief of the city government’s public employment office at the time she was killed.
The victims were on their way home in a car together when their motorcycle-riding assailants, trailing behind and armed with 9-millimeter pistols, opened fire as they got close, hitting them both in different parts of their bodies.
Mangudadatu, chair of the provincial peace and order council, said Chief Inspector Lendsy Sinsuat of the Datu Odin municipal police is now personally leading a team of probers tasked to identify the culprits for them to be prosecuted immediately.
Investigators hinted the ambushers could be professional "guns-for-hire," but declined to elaborate.
The suspects were armed with sophisticated pistols fitted with optional three-round bursts firing contraptions, which are too expensive to acquire.
The couple was attacked at the main road of the SPDA Village northwest of Datu Odin, not far from a sprawling military training complex of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division.
The crime scene is about six kilometers from the center of Cotabato City.
The incident was preceded by the ambush in nearby Barangay Dulangan, in the same municipality, of a car carrying members of the Ayunan clan in Cotabato City.
Five were killed in the attack, among them a four year-old child.
The big Ayunan family, whose members control the vote-rich seaside Kalanganan District in Cotabato City politically, are locked in a deadly "rido" (clan war) with an equally big group in the area.
The slain Ayunans were riding a car together en route to Cotabato City from Sultan Kudarat province when they were attacked by rifle-wielding gunmen on board a pick-up truck trailing behind.
The Datu Odin municipal police had announced Saturday, through dxMS radio outfit in Cotabato City, that corresponding criminal cases had been filed against five of the suspects, whose identities were validated by probers with the help of witnesses.
Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and Assemblyman Khadafeh Mangudadatu of the ARMM’s 24-seat Regional Assembly, also condemned Saturday’s murder of the Busque couple.
"I am calling on the Maguindanao provincial police to exhaust all means of identifying the ambushers for them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of law," Assemblyman Mangudadatu said.
Hataman told reporters he had instructed the ARMM’s regional police director, Chief Superintendent Ronald Estilles, to dispatch to Datu Odin his subordinate-intelligence officers to help investigate on the incident.