Blasting charges for landmines unearthed

COTABATO CITY – Soldiers recovered yesterday 50 large dynamite sticks and about a hundred kilos of blasting charges and other materials for fabrication of landmines buried in the middle of a dirt road in Columbio, Sultan Kudarat.

Col. Ricardo Santiago, commander of the Army’s 27th Infantry Battalion, said they discovered explosives buried in Barangay De La Paz in Columbio through information fed to them by former members of the New People’s Army.

Santiago said the explosives, neatly placed in sealed cylinders of refrigerant Freon gas, were buried some six feet underneath a farm-to-market road linking two villages connecting Columbio, Sultan Kudarat, to Koronadal City.

“Most likely the explosives were buried there prior to the construction of the farm-to-market road,” Santiago said.

Santiago said the surface of the road was compacted that they have to use a back hoe excavator to dig into the spot where the explosives were buried.

Santiago said tipsters have confirmed that the cache were buried by fleeing NPAs in the area in 2000, when soldiers were running after Moro secessionist rebels at the height of then President Estrada’s all-out pacification campaign against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Local officials said the explosives belong to a certain Commander Legaspi of the NPA’s Front 76, which is operating at the tri-boundaries of North Cotabato, Davao del Sur and Sultan Kudarat provinces.