Moro town councilor, Teduray tribal chieftain killed in separate gun attacks

COTABATO CITY — A Moro community leader and an ethnic Teduray chieftain, both active in peacebuilding programs in their municipalities, were killed in separate gun attacks in Maguindanao del Sur province on Tuesday, September 17.

The first to perish in the two separate atrocities is Mohammad Alamada, a municipal councilor in Buluan, who was shot dead by gunmen while inside his family’s roadside restaurant along a highway in the municipality at around Tuesday noon.

The Buluan Municipal Police Station, in a report to Brig. Gen. Prexy Tanggawohn, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, on Thursday said that the killers of Alamada escaped immediately using a getaway vehicle, a Toyota Avanza, without license plates.

Alamada, also a municipal official of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was known for his involvement in projects complementing the Mindanao peace process of the government and southern Moro sectors and for helping their local government unit maintain law and order in Buluan, the capital of Maguindanao del Sur.

About ten hours after the bloody incident in the town proper of Buluan, another peace advocate, the ethnic Teduray chieftain Elvin Moires, died in an ambush at a stretch of an unlit farm-to-market road in Barangay Bongo in South Upi, a hinterland town in Maguindanao del Sur. 

Moires, a barangay councilor in Bongo, was involved extensively in activities promoting religious and cultural solidarity among Maguindanaon Moro Muslims and non-Muslim Tedurays in South Upi.

Officials of the South Upi Municipal Police Station and members of the Municipal Peace and Order Council, led by South Upi Mayor Reynalbert Insular, told reporters that Teduray tribal leaders are helping investigators identify the killers of Moires, whose house was reportedly shot with assault rifles by attackers in 2018.

The gun attack that left Moires dead was preceded by the fatal ambush just last August of the Teduray vice mayor of South Upi, Mayor Roldan Benito and his private bodyguard, Weng Marcos, in Barangay Pandan, just a few kilometers away from the center of their highland municipality.

The vice mayor and Marcos were together in a pick-up truck, on their way to an interior area in Barangay Pandan from Barangay Romongaob in the same town, when their attackers, positioned along the route, opened fire with assault rifles, killing them both instantly.

The slain Benito, who, as vice mayor, was presiding chairperson of the South Upi Sangguniang Bayan, was known for his strong stance against intrusion of non-Teduray armed groups into their ancestral domains, grabbing farmlands of helpless, unarmed native inhabitants relying mainly on propagation of corn, upland rice varieties and other short-term crops as means of livelihood.