3 soldiers hurt in crossfire as Maranao clans clash

MALABANG, Lanao del Sur — Three soldiers were wounded and hundreds of travelers got stranded on a stretch of highway in Barangay Biosong in Picong, Lanao del Sur, where two heavily armed Maranao clans were involved in gunfights on Saturday, November 7.

The wounded soldiers, the Privates Jude Deligero, Cupid Val Masibog Mosque and Reymond Padawan, of the Army’s 64th Infantry Battalion, were in a group dispatched to intervene in the conflict involving members of the Labao and Gaosil clans, armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers, but got trapped in the ensuing crossfire instead.

The two conflict protagonists are locked in a deadly long-time rido, which means clan war in Moro vernaculars.  

Provincial officials in Lanao del Sur separately told reporters on Sunday that hundreds of passengers of private and public transportation and motorists were forced to stand by for some six hours at stretches of the Lanao del Sur-Zamboanga del Sur Highway in Barangay Biosong that soldiers and policemen closed down as members of the two clans traded shots along the route.

Captain Steffie Salanguit, spokesperson of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, told reporters on Sunday that their regional director. Brig. Gen. Christopher Abecia, had ordered officials of their units in Lanao del Sur to help local executives in the adjoining Picong and Malabang towns, both in the province, to reposition the two groups away from each other.

Traditional Maranao leaders in Picong said it was members of the Labao clan who fired at the soldiers approaching their location, hurting Deligero, Mosque and Padawan.

The companions of the three soldiers wounded in the attack returned fire, forcing their attackers to scamper away.

The Labao family members reportedly attacked the Gaosils in their homestead in Barangay Biosong, provoking a gunfight that sent no fewer than 500 innocent villagers running for their lives.

The two clans, politically hostile to each other, are locked in squabbles for control of swaths of land in Barangay Biosong, according to local executives in Picong, one of the 39 towns in Lanao del Sur, close to Zamboanga del Sur province in Region 9.