Cotabato TV reporter hurt in grenade attack

COTABATO CITY — A news stringer of a local ABS-CBN station suffered leg injuries after a grenade thrown by two motorcycle-riding men exploded outside his house here Sunday night, police said.

The blast was the 15th to hit this city since January.

Witnesses saw the two men lob the grenade onto the roof of Salathiel Sacil, 40, a correspondent and marketing executive of ABS-CBN’s Channel 5 station here, before speeding away, Senior Superintendent Sangacala Dampac, city police chief, said.

The grenade went off when it fell outside Sacil’s room, hitting him with a shrapnel in his left leg, Dampac said.

Sacil, who reports on local issues, said he is confused on the possible motive behind the attack, adding that he has no known enemies. He believes he might have been mistaken for someone else.

Authorities are similarly clueless. "Although we are aware that he has no known enemies, we have to investigate deeper first before we can come out with a good conclusion of what could have triggered the incident," Dampac said.

There have been previous attempts on the lives of journalists here.

In 1995, two gunmen ambushed and wounded correspondents Nash Maulana of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Ali Macabalang of Manila Bulletin along a busy street here.

The incident was followed by the gruesome killing of Nelson Roni, a reporter of radio station dxMY here, by two pistol-wielding suspects while on his way home to nearby Sultan Kudarat on board a passenger jeepney.

On May 28, 1999, this writer shot it out with two suspected guns-for-hire armed with .45 automatics. Though wounded, the gunmen managed to escape toward Barangay Pagalamatan before policemen arrived.

The attack on Sacil’s house came just four days after Army bomb experts detonated a Russian-made fragmentation grenade tossed by motorcycle-riding men but failed to explode, in front of the residence here of the municipal engineer of Matanog, Maguindanao.

Engineer Zandro Saglayan, who belongs to the Iranon tribe, said they heard a thud on the roof, but thought it was a ripe mango that fell from a tree beside their house.

"We were stunned when we later discovered that it was a fragmentation grenade," he said.

Tension has reigned in Matanog, about 40 kilometers from this city, since March following the ambush of its mayor, Hadji Nasser Imam, on a critical stretch of the Secretary Narciso Ramos Highway.

Imam survived the attack unscathed, but one of his security escorts was killed while seven others were wounded in the ensuing gunbattle.

Last May 1, seven people were killed and 94 others were wounded when a Mark II fragmentation grenade was hurled at a fiesta concert at the Notre Dame Village. Suspected members of a teenage gang were implicated in the incident.