7 disguised as soldiers, cops nabbed in Marawi

LANAO DEL SUR, Philippines — Authorities foiled Wednesday an attempt by five men and two women to enter Marawi City wearing Army and police uniforms.

Ariel Cabanes Bijaan, Pacito Sabuclalao Villanueva, Juniper Adlawan Alestre, Bienvenido Malasa Sepe, Florante Ramos Alejandrino, Rufina Gomez Gayatao and Elsie Timola Lantong, are now detained at the Marawi City police station, undergoing interrogation.

Chief Superintendent Reuben Theodore Sindac, police director for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, told The STAR Thursday that they were intercepted by soldiers and policemen guarding a checkpoint along a stretch of the Iligan-Marawi Highway onboard a White Toyota Fortuner en route to Marawi City.

Sindac said the suspects were immediately arrested when checkpoint sentries noticed that the Army uniforms they wore have different unit insignias.

“They have different kinds of identification cards too,” Sindac said, citing an initial report by the Marawi City police office.

Investigators also found extra Army and police uniforms in their vehicle that the local police also impounded.

Senior police officers in Marawi City said there is a possibility that the suspects were out to help certain Maute terrorists escape from the areas where they laid siege that are now cordoned by government security forces.

Sindac said probers have already established that the seven suspects are neither connected to the Philippine National Police nor to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

They also turned in identification cards bearing the seal of the Moro National Liberation Front, according to Sindac.

Their botched attempt to enter Marawi City was preceded by the arrest of Lala Arafat, a confessed member of the Maute terror group, in an evacuation site in Saguiaran town in Lanao del Sur last Sunday.

Arafat, 38, was positively identified by evacuees from Marawi City as henchman of siblings Omar and Abdullah Maute.

The Maute brothers are founders of the Dawlah Islamiya, or the Maute terror group, which operates in the fashion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Arafat, a resident of Barangay Osmeña in Marawi City, was arrested by municipal police personnel while mingling with internally-displaced people in a relief site in the town proper of Saguiaran.

Sindac said the Saguiran municipal police learned of the presence of Arafat in the evacuation site from vigilant evacuees aware of his link with the Dawlah Islamiya.