ZAMBOANGA CITY, 14 December 2007 — A homemade bomb exploded in front of the house of a regional election official in the southern Philippine province of Sulu, but the attack had killed no one, the police and military said yesterday.
The bombing, which came two days ahead of special village and youth elections in Sulu and six other provinces in Mindanao, was the second in Sulu in barely a week.
On Dec. 9, a similar bomb went off outside the Commission on Elections office in Jolo’s provincial administrative building.
The attack before dawn targeted the house of lawyer Vidzfar Julie in the town of Indanan on Jolo Island.
Police said the blast that damaged the façade of the house. No group or individual claimed responsibility for the bombing, but authorities suspect the blast had something to do with special elections tomorrow.
Julie was not in the province at the time of the attack yesterday, the police in Indanan said.
A former poll supervisor in Sulu, he was promoted as Comelec chief for the six-province Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), of which Sulu is a part.
Elections in May failed in some towns in Sulu because of the presence of gunmen and many teachers tapped as poll officers did not report for work due to threats to their lives. Others refused to work because of non-payments of their salaries since early this year by the Department of Education in the autonomous region.
Politics in Jolo are often tainted with violence, with rival political groups sometimes exchanging gunfire and resorting to intimidation to win polls.
Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf militants and other armed groups with ties to warring politicians operate in Jolo, an impoverished island in the Philippines’ southernmost tip.
Troops numbering more than 5,000 are scouring Jolo’s interior jungles and hinterlands for remnants of the Abu Sayyaf, blamed for the country’s worst terrorist attacks, including the firebombing of a passenger ferry in Manila Bay that left over 100 dead in 2004. (With input from AFP)
