ZAMBOANGA/COTABATO, 5 January 2004 — A bomb attack believed to be aimed at the mayor of Parang town in troubled Maguindanao province killed 15 people yesterday and injured about 50 others, officials said.

Mayor Vivencio Bataga, the target, escaped death but was badly injured and lost some teeth, according to the police and military.

Officials said the mayor was returning to his seat at about 4 p.m. after giving a speech at the opening of a basketball tournament inside a gymnasium in the town center when the bomb exploded.

“The impact was so strong that many were hit by shrapnel and the vehicles outside, including the mayor’s car, were heavily damaged,” said police officer Sharifa Irijan Irijani in a telephone interview.

Although authorities said the bomb was planted on a motorcycle parked in front of the gymnasium, Irijani said many of the victims were hit by shrapnel inside the gymnasium, which had a roof but no walls. Others were hurt in the stampede, she said.

Witnesses said the spectators were mostly teenagers. Bloodstains, rubber sandals, T-shirts and twisted metal from vehicles littered the blast site, they said.

Among the identified victims were Mayflor Baldon, a nursing graduate; fire officer Nasser Akmad of the Parang Fire Bureau; Salman Macarimbang, son of Barira town Vice Mayor Padian Macarimbang Jr.; Bryan Tomawis; Alonzo Batulan; Mariam Tomawis; Pamrona Tumawis and Maris Macauyag. Two others, a male and a female, remained unidentified as of press time.

Nelida, Baldon’s mother, said her daughter was apparently close to the site of the explosion because the blast mangled her body.

Aside from Bataga, among those injured were senior police officers Gilbert Antonio and Romeo Caupayan.

Garcia said most of the victims were rushed to Cotabato City where the AFP sent several military doctors to address the shortage of medical attendants there.

“People were crying. Others were shouting and running,” said one basketball player who was wounded in the leg.

“That’s all I can remember because I lost consciousness.”

Lt. Gen. Rodolfo Garcia, the vice chief of staff, said they have strong reasons to believe the attackers were after Bataga, a former army colonel and a Christian, who is seeking a second term as mayor of the largely Muslim town.

“We’re not completely ruling out the terrorism angle but the political motive is much stronger,” Garcia was quoted as saying.

Bataga, a tough-talking former army officer, had blamed political rivals or drug syndicates in September for a bomb explosion in front of a local church where he was attending Mass with his family. One of his bodyguards was slightly injured.

Unidentified men had earlier fired a rocket-propelled grenade that missed Bataga’s vehicle, and in April, a bomb exploded while he was in a public market.

Police said they were on high alert for potential reprisals or other attacks in an area awash with weapons and suspected of being a training ground for Muslim rebels linked to Jemaah Islamiah, a regional network of militants.

The rugged land around Parang is a stronghold of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest of several homegrown guerrilla groups seeking an Islamic state in the southern Philippines.

But police played down the chances that yesterday’s blast was a rebel attack. A shaky cease-fire with the MILF has held so far as the rebels inch toward formal peace talks with the government.

“Investigators are looking at the possibility that it was an assassination attempt against the mayor,” General Avelino Razon, the operations chief of the Philippine National Police, told Reuters. “That’s the primary angle.”

Razon said the bomb was assembled from a 60-mm mortar shell that was tied to the motorcycle.

Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the MILF, denied the rebels had any involvement in the attack.

“The mayor is known to have many political enemies,” Kabalu told Reuters.

In Zamboanga City, a nine-year boy was killed when a bomb exploded in Barangay Boalan at around 10:30 a.m. yesterday.

Chief Inspector Jose Bayani Gucela, chief of the police’s Explosives and Ordnance Disposal Unit, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the bomb, suspected to be of the same type used by wildlife hunters, exploded near the house of Efren Villado along Pablo Fernandez Drive.

The lone fatality was identified as Fredmor Ramos Falcasantos.

Villado told police he saw the boy playing with a rounded object which he put inside his pocket.

Floramae Falcasantos, the boy’s mother, said her son was playing with some children when the explosion occurred.