MILF commander with P500,000 bounty killed in Cotabato

CAMP SIONGCO, Shariff Kabunsuan – Moro Islamic Liberation Front gunmen shot dead a rival MILF commander after raiding his hideout in a remote village in Cotabato province yesterday, according to Gov. Emmanuel Piñol.

Quoting informants, Piñol, Cotabato provincial peace and order council chairman, said a certain Commander Bauzi and his men killed Commander Pakil Ayunan.

His informants, among them barangay officials and members of the municipal council in Pikit, Cotabato, have confirmed that Bauzi and his men attacked the hideout of Ayunan and shot him dead, he added.

Highly placed sources from Army intelligence confirmed that Bauzi belongs to the MILF.

Ayunan, central Mindanao’s most wanted person, belonged to the MILF’s 106th Base Command, sources said.

In a report to the Army’s 6th Infantry Division based in Shariff Kabunsuan, the 602nd Brigade said Ayunan was killed in his hideout in barangay Gokoton, a remote district in Pikit, Cotabato.

Ayunan, who carried a P500,000 reward on his head, was held responsible for the massacre of more than 50 people in two different barangays in Cotabato province in the 1990s and 2000.

The last of the massacres took place in barangay Cadiis, where Ayunan and his men herded 16 villagers, including grade school pupils into a spot and sprayed them with automatic rifle fire, killing all.

Ayunan, before escaping with his men, told horrified witnesses that the massacre of the 16 civilians was in retaliation for the government’s takeover, about a month earlier, of the MILF’s former bastion, Camp Abubakar at the tri-boundaries of Maguindanao’s Buldon, Barira and Matanog towns.

The MILF has repeatedly disowned Ayunan, but local officials in Carmen and Pikit towns said he remained a member of the front until the time of his death.

In a press statement emailed to different media outfits, 1Lt. Reggie Bernardino, Army 602nd Brigade civil-military relations chief based in Carmen, said top commanders of the MILF in Cotabato attended the burial rites for Ayunan in barangay Luanan in Pikit.