2 dead in 2 Central Mindanao ambush incidents

COTABATO CITY — A spouse of a retired police colonel and a former employee of an agency in the defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao were killed in separate ambush incidents in Cotabato City and in Kidapawan City on Monday morning.

The Cotabato City Police Office, in an initial report to Brig. Gen. Prexy Tanggawohn, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, said the first ambush fatality, Maria Alona Villar, was walking along Moonlight Street in Barangay Rosary Heights 8 in Cotabato City when one of two men positioned along the route, waiting for her, shot her with a pistol.

The two culprits escaped using a getaway motorcycle after killing Villar, wife of retired Police Col. Henry Villar.

The spot where she was killed is less than a hundred meters away from her residence.

About an hour later, gunmen attacked and killed Narris Maon while driving his car at a stretch of a highway in Barangay Balindog in Kidapawan City, the capital of Cotabato province in Region 12.

Maon’s car collided head-on with a dump truck approaching from the opposite direction of the highway when he lost control of the wheel due to bullet wounds in his head and upper torso, damaging the vehicle.

Maon was a former employee of an agency of ARMM that got replaced with a more administratively empowered Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao via a plebiscite in 2019, a product of 22 years of peace talks between the government and the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.