2 hurt in Cebu roadblock blast

CEBU CITY — Two men were hurt, one of them seriously, when four young men in a taxi tried to run through a police checkpoint at the reclamation area in Mandaue City and lobbed a grenade in their attempt to escape last Saturday night.

This was the second violent incident at a police checkpoint in three weeks. Last July 2, an armed man refused to be frisked and took several people hostage.

In Saturday night’s incident, police tried to flag down a Mandaue-bound taxi carrying four men. Instead of heeding the police, the group pulled out guns and told the driver, Jose Oyanguren, to speed through or else he would be shot.

Oyanguren applied the brakes and jumped out of his taxi. As the vehicle screeched to a halt, the four men, said to be in their 20s, also jumped out, three of them into the Subangdaku River, firing shots at the lawmen as they swam away.

The fourth man pulled out a grenade, threatening to hurl it for awhile, and then jumped back into the taxi.

As he sped away, he lobbed the grenade at the policemen, wounding two civilian anti-crime volunteers and damaging two motorcycles that had stopped at the checkpoint.

The taxi was later found abandoned in Lapu-Lapu City. — Freeman News Service