Vice mayor, security aide killed in Maguindanao del Sur ambush

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Gunmen killed with assault rifles the ethnic Teduray vice mayor of South Upi in Maguindanao del Sur and his security aide in an ambush on Friday afternoon that left two others wounded.

Citing a report from the South Upi Municipal Police Station, Brig. Gen. Prexy Tanggawohn, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, told reporters on Saturday that Vice Mayor Roldan Benito and companion Weng Marcos, also a Teduray, both died instantly from multiple gunshot wounds sustained in the attack.

Benito’s spouse, Analyn, and a minor, Joseph Mutia, were wounded in the ambush, now both confined in a hospital.

The victims were together in a pick-up truck, on their way to a Teduray dominated farming village in Barangay Pandan from the town center of South Upi when gunmen positioned along the route opened fire with assault rifles, killing Benito and Marcos on the spot.

A Teduray member of the 80-seat Bangsamoro parliament, Froilyn Tenorio Mendoza, and South Upi Mayor Reynalbert Insulart, have separately condemned the atrocity and called on the PRO-BAR and the Army’s 6th Infantry Division to cooperate in identifying the culprits for them to be prosecuted in court.

Insular, now a third-termer mayor of South Upi, was nearly killed in an ambush at a stretch of the Cotabato-North Upi Highway in 2022 and, subsequently, survived a roadside bombing unscathed near the town proper of their municipality last year.