Killings in Tiruray land over property row alarms Church

COTABATO CITY — The Catholic community yesterday called on the police and military to promptly intervene in the spate of killings in Maguindanao’s South Upi town, regarded as the "last frontier" of the Tiruray natives.

A 50-year-old Tiruray tribesman was killed while three others were wounded when suspected partisans raked with combat rifles a World War II vintage 6x6 truck carrying high school students on their way to their hinterland village from the town proper of South Upi, Maguindanao Thursday night.

The parish priest of South Upi, Fr. King Tabuada, who belongs to the pontifical Oblates of Mary Immaculate, warned that the nagging security problems in the area would worsen if government forces and local officials would not formulate immediate measures to stave off more confrontations of local partisan factions.

Since January, more than a dozen people, mostly Tirurays, have been killed in hostilities for control of vote-rich communities and patches of arable lands in South Upi, a known lair of the obscure Indigenous People’s Federal Army, or IPFA.

Army Maj. Julieto Ando, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, identified the lone fatality in the recent bloody incident in South Upi as Alano Gunsi, a Tiruray farmer.

Gunsi, along with more than a dozen hitchhikers, mostly students of the Timanan Barangay Municipal High School at the poblacion of South Upi, was on his way home on board a private 6x6 truck when hooded gunmen, positioned on one side of the road, blocked their path and opened fire.

Three students, Mary Anne Calay, Mary Grace Garcia and Johnny Unggi, were wounded in the shooting frenzy and are now confined in different dispensaries in nearby Cotabato City. — John Unson