[ad_1]
MANILA, Philippines – Gunmen blocked a group of motorcyclists and then opened fire with assault rifles in a busy city center in the southern Philippines, killing nine people, police said Sunday, in the latest violence to hit. the volatile region.
Police authorities said the attack on the victims, mostly farmers, at noon on Saturday in the town of Kabacan in Cotabato province may have been triggered by a local dispute and was likely not an act of terrorism.
Cotabato is in a poverty-stricken region where a decades-long Muslim separatist insurgency has been eased in large part due to a 2014 peace deal between the Philippines’ largest Muslim rebel group and the government, though small armed groups aligned with the Islamic State group they still pose a problem. threat.
Most of the victims of Saturday’s attack apparently did not know each other and were riding on six motorcycles, some on tandems, when they were blocked by six or eight armed men and ordered to get out. After getting off their motorcycles in the middle of the road, they were shot at least 39 times with rifles and pistols, police investigator Delir Parcon said by phone.
Eight of the victims died instantly and another died in a hospital, according to a police report. The gunmen fled in a van. Police have interviewed witnesses and were looking for possible images from security cameras that could help identify the attackers, law enforcement officials said.
“It’s not likely terrorism,” Parcon said. “We are looking at the angle of a local dispute, a personal grudge.”
Former Muslim guerrillas who forged an autonomy agreement with the government and are now overseeing a nearby Muslim autonomy region said they would help investigate the killings of the men, who were all Muslim.
“Such senseless violent acts have no place in a progressive society, especially at a time when people are in the grip of a pandemic,” they said in a statement.
The proliferation of large numbers of unlicensed firearms and other weapons, weak law enforcement in many rural areas, and the presence of powerful insurgent groups and clans with private armies have combined to fuel violence in the heart. southern Philippines and peripheral island provinces. The region is the homeland of Muslim minorities in the largely Roman Catholic nation.
Last Monday, two female militants detonated powerful bombs in separate suicide attacks that killed 15 people, including eight soldiers and a police commando, and injured more than 70 in the southern city of Jolo in Sulu province at worst. extremist attack in the country so far. year.
President Rodrigo Duterte flew to Jolo on Sunday under heavy security measures to meet the victims of the explosion and their families.
The military blamed an extremist Abu Sayyaf commander, Mundi Sawadjaan, for planning the noon suicide bombings, which also killed the two attackers. The attackers were local widows of Abu Sayyaf militants, according to the army, in what could be the first known suicide attacks of Filipino extremist women if their identities can be confirmed.
Army rangers clashed with some 30 Abu Sayyaf militants in the mountainous jungles of Sulu’s city of Patikul on Saturday, in clashes that left one soldier and injured seven others. Sawadjaan was believed to be with the militants, but he was not among the two who died in the fighting, the regional military commander, Major General Corleto Vinluan, told reporters.
