ZAMBOANGA CITY, 17 September 2003 — Unidentified gunmen ambushed a group of Muslim preachers and their followers and killed two people on a remote village in Basilan Island in the southern Philippines, an official said yesterday.
A preacher and one of his students were killed in the Monday attack in the village of Campo Uno in Tipo-Tipo town, said Chief Supt. Acmad Omar, the chief of police in the Muslim autonomous region.
The Radio Mindanao Network (RMN) in Basilan said the preachers were with several dozen followers when gunmen waylaid them and escaped after the attack.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Abu Sayyaf rebels and the larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) are known to operate in the island, several miles south of Zamboanga City.
Members of the Abu Sayyaf, a group involved in various kidnapping cases in the south, were known to have attacked their own fellow Muslims in Basilan in the past.
In mainland Mindanao, former rebels clashed with members of the MILF on Monday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties on both sides, a military official said. The clash occured in the hinterland village of Pangancalan in North Cotabato’s Pigkawayan town, said Col. Fredesvindo Covarrubias, commander of the armed forces’ 4th Civil Relation Group.
Covarrubias said the fighting erupted after MILF forces attacked former rebels who surrendered to the government. “The rebels were harassing former MILF fighters who surrendered to the government,” he told journalists here. “We have no immediate reports of casualties.”
He said the fighting lasted more than an hour and only stopped after MILF forces retreated to the hinterlands. “Those rebels who surrendered are now living peacefully with their families, but their former comrades have been threatening them for yielding to us. These people are tired of fighting and wanted to live peacefully,” he said.
There was no immediate reaction from the MILF, which had repeatedly dismissed reports of separatist fighters surrendering as “plain military propaganda.”
Farther east in the province of Compostela, suspected New People’s Army (NPA) rebels torched a commuter bus after robbing dozens of passengers, another military officer said.
The rebels, armed with automatic weapons, flagged down the bus late Monday near the village of Bongbong in Pantukan town and ordered the passengers off the vehicle and divested them of money and personal belongings, military spokesman Lt. Col. Daniel Lucero said.
Lucero said the rebels later burned the bus, owned by Bachelor Express Inc., and then fled to the hinterlands. “Troops were sent to pursue the gunmen,” Lucero told reporters.
The bus was enroute to Davao province when the gunmen struck.
