No suspects arrested yet in Christmas Day bombing of Sulu chapel

ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines – No suspects have yet been arrested in the Christmas Day bombing of a Catholic chapel in Sulu.

Chief Superintendent Felicisimo Khu, Integrated Police Operation Western Mindanao director, said yesterday intelligence was firming up all information for the capture of the perpetrators. 

“At the moment there is no information yet who slipped the bomb but the evidences that might be collected will lead our police operatives and the military intelligence in the area as to the possible bombers and the group behind blast,” he said.

Lt. Col. Randolf Cabangbang, Armed Forces Western Mindanao Command spokesman, said police and military explosive ordnance and disposal unit personnel have already recovered parts of a cell phone believed to have been used to trigger the explosive.

The bomb was not intended to inflict maximum casualty, police said. 

It is not the first attack on the Catholic chapel inside the tightly guarded Camp Asturias, a few meters away from the quarters of the Sulu provincial police director in Jolo.

In December 1993, gunmen led by Galib Andang, later known as Commander Robot kidnapped American priest Fr. Clarence Bertelsman while celebrating Misa de Gallo.

Andang, who started as a member of the Moro National Liberation Front, and his followers pretended they were to attend the Mass.

After seeing Bertelsman at the altar, they took him at gunpoint and tried to take him to nearby Indanan town.  

Responding soldiers and members of the MNLF led by relatives of Nur Misuari, rescued Bertelsman after a three-hour chase, which resulted in a brief encounter that left four of Andang’s followers and Bertelsman wounded.

Bertelsman, after recuperating from a gunshot wound in the buttocks, was reassigned to an Oblate mission in Central Mindanao, and subsequently, died of a heart ailment four years later.

Andang later bolted the MNLF after the bungled kidnapping and helped Ustadz Abubakar Janjalani, an Afghan-trained guerilla, organize the now notorious Abu Sayyaf.

Three Oblate missionaries were killed one after another in Sulu, a component province of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, earning for the province the moniker “deadliest area for Catholic preachers.”

In 1997, Sulu’s vicar, Benjamin de Jesus, also a member of the Oblate of Mary Immaculate congregation, was on his way to the Mt. Carmel Cathedral in downtown Jolo when two men, armed with caliber .45 pistols, shot him repeatedly after alighting from his jeep to enter the premises of the Catholic chapel.

The murder of De Jesus remains unsolved and the gunmen that shot him remain at large.

Four years later, another Oblate priest, Benjamin Inocencio, was shot in the head by a still unknown assailant on the streets of Jolo.

The premises of Mt. Carmel Cathedral in Jolo have been bombed about five times since the early 1990s.

The Sulu provincial police remain clueless on the identities of the bombers.

The Oblates first arrived in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi after World War II to put up schools and missions for impoverished Muslim communities.

Hundreds of Muslim children have become professionals as scholars of the Oblates.

The most recent attack on the Oblate community in Sulu happened more than two years ago which resulted to the death of a popular missionary, Rey Roda.

More than 10 men snatched Roda, who hails from Cotabato City, from their convent in an island town at the sea border of Sulu and Tawi-Tawi and killed him when he fought back.

Roda was involved in scholarship projects for Muslim children in that island town.

He was also active in a special project meant to propagate public awareness on the dangers of dynamite and cyanide fishing in coral reefs in vast marine fishing grounds in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

ARMM acting Gov. Ansarudin Adiong, ordered yesterday the regional police to identify the people behind the bombing of the chapel in Camp Asturias and file appropriate charges against them.

Adiong, an ethnic Maranaw Muslim, said the attack was “satanic” and unIslamic.

“Islam teaches very strong respect for worship sites and religious leaders, whether they are Muslims or non-Muslims,” Adiong said in s statement. – With John Unson, Helen Flores