Reds raid 3rd police station in a week

Communist rebels disguised as soldiers raided a police station in Misamis Occidental Monday and seized weapons in the third such guerrilla operation in less than a week, police said. No injuries were reported.

About 15 New People’s Army (NPA) rebels in military uniforms arrived in a truck and surprised police in Sapang Dalaga town, said Chief Superintendent Florante Baguio, regional police director.

The rebels ordered the town police chief and several of his men to lie face down at gunpoint as they ransacked lockers and took five M-16 rifles.

One officer, who was outside the station, fired at the rebels when he saw them pointing guns at his colleagues’ heads.

The rebels later fled with the rifles. No one was reported injured in the shooting.

Last Saturday, guerrillas posing as National Bureau of Investigation agents seized five high-powered weapons from the Botolan police station in northern Zambales.

Separately, the rebels netted five assault rifles and a machine gun in a similar raid early Sunday in Escalante City in Negros Occidental.

No one was hurt in both raids.

Last Sunday, two rebels and a soldier were killed in an encounter in Tabuelan, Cebu.

At least 20 heavily armed guerrillas, meanwhile, torched an airconditioned bus at the Bataan Transit compound in Barangay San Isidro in Mariveles, Bataan yesterday morning.

The bus terminal is located some three kilometers away from the municipal police station.

Senior Superintendent Hernando Zafra, Bataan police director, said the rebels, armed with M-16 and M-14 rifles, arrived in two vans with tinted windows and without license plates.

The rebels disarmed the lone security guard and ordered everyone to fall in line while some of them boarded one of the parked buses and poured gasoline on it, Zafra said.

Police said the rebels have been demanding "revolutionary taxes" from the Bataan Transit management.

Last Oct. 20, rebels torched a new Bataan Transit bus along the Roman Superhighway in Abucay town.

The NPA and the underground Communist Party of the Philippines have been on US and European terrorist lists since 2001.

They suspended Norwegian-brokered talks with the government in 2004, saying the administration of President Arroyo had refused to try to get them removed from the terror blacklists.

The guerrillas, who have been waging a rural-based Marxist insurgency since the late 1960s, number about 7,500, according to military estimates. — Roel Pareño, Raffy Viray