2 feuding Muslim clans in gun battle

COTABATO CITY — Two feuding Muslim clans in Maguindanao clashed in the city yesterday using military-type weapons, leaving five people wounded, one of them a son of an incumbent mayor in the province.

Senior Supt. Sangacala Dampac, city police director, said they still have no solid clues on who provoked the hostilities involving members of the warring Macapeges and Imam clans, both of Matanog, a hinterland town in Maguindanao.

The Macapages and Imam families are closely related to each other, but have been squabbling for the mayoral post of their hometown, not far away from Camp Abubakar, the former bastion of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Dampac said one of those wounded was Imam’s eldest son, Datu Baby Boy, now undergoing treatment at a local hospital.

Dampac, quoting witnesses, said the two groups just chanced upon each other at the Kimpo Area here and figured in a running gun battle.

The two groups traded shots for five minutes and waned only after members of both sides were wounded in the ensuing firefight.

Investigators said one of those who was seriously wounded was Jamal Macapages, son of Hadji Kahar Macapages, who contested Imam’s re-election bid during last year’s May 11 local elections.

Imam, a second-termer, survived an ambush early this year in a secluded stretch of the Secretary Narciso Ramos Highway in Matanog.

Police and military probers tagged members of the Macapeges clan, two of them members of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao police, as responsible for Imam’s near fatal ambush, which left one of the mayor’s security men dead and five others wounded.

Three of those wounded in yesterday’s incident here were policemen assigned as security escorts of the Macapeges family.