Cotabato City radio station still getting threats

COTABATO CITY — Catholic radio station dxMS here, whose transmitter site was shelled with an 81 mm mortar the other day, continued to receive threats of renewed attacks from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) if it would not stop airing a nightly hour-long program critical of the separatist group.

The threats prompted the management of dxMS, the city’s leading broadcast outfit, to install caller identification devices on all its telephones to determine the phone numbers of outside callers.

Two squads of Marines from the 5th Marine Battalion Landing Team now secure the premises of dxMS at the compound of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral.

Col. Tereso Badayos, chief of staff of the 2nd Marine Brigade here, said some of their intelligence operatives have been tasked to determine the identities of the perpetrators of the mortar attack, which left a technician seriously wounded.

Last Monday’s bombing of the radio station’s transmitter site was the second bomb attack on the broadcast outfit in six days. Last week, a powerful rocket grenade, apparently fired from a high ground a few blocks away, exploded near the station, wounding three bystanders, one of them a policeman.

The mortar shell destroyed a makeshift warehouse less than 10 meters from the radio station’s 370-foot high transmission tower.

The blast was so strong that metal fragments of the mortar perforated the walls of the station’s staffhouse, wounding technician Erick Tanod-Tanod.

Investigators said the 81 mm mortar could have been fired from the Pagalamatan district here, a known entry and escape route of lawless elements.

Employees of dxMS said they received phone calls from anonymous persons after the mortar attack, threatening more attacks on the station if it would not stop airing the nightly anti-MILF program "Radio Kalimudan (which means convergence)."

The program is hosted by engineer-preacher Zamzamin Ampatuan, who has been critical of the MILF’s concept of a puritan Islamic state.

Ampatuan, a scion of an influential Muslim clan in Maguindanao, has survived two assassination attempts allegedly staged by the MILF.

In the first attempt, suspected MILF rebels blasted an improvised explosive fashioned from a live round of 60 mm mortar, at the garage of dxMS, just as Ampatuan alighted from his L-300 van and was about to enter the radio station’s building. Five people were wounded in the blast.

Last July, heavily armed men ambushed Ampatuan while on his way home from the radio station, killing one of his Army escorts and wounding four others, including himself.