9 hurt in public terminal blast

COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Nine people were injured, two of them critically, in yet another bombing that ripped through a public terminal in Tacurong City past 10 a.m.yesterday, an attack the military blamed on militant factions of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The victims were rushed to different hospitals in Tacurong City, the commercial hub of Sultan Kudarat province.

Local investigators said the bomb, fashioned from a live mortar round rigged with a battery-operated blasting mechanism and packed in a container filled with jagged fragments of cast iron, was left by two men at one spot in the public terminal and went off after the suspects have left.

Local officials in the province said they have received information from their constituents purporting that the attack was masterminded by Basit Usman, a guerilla ordnance expert long wanted for a series of deadly bombings in Central Mindanao from 2005 to early 2008.  

Eid Kabalu, spokesman of the MILF, said the police should first investigate on the incident to determine the real culprits.

“As always, it is the MILF that becomes the `whipping boy’ whenever there are bombings and other high-profile atrocities in Mindanao. The MILF will not gain anything perpetrating such atrocities,” Kabalu said.

Col. Jonathan Ponce, civil-military relations chief of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said the bombing could be a diversionary attack pulled off by renegade MILF forces, now subject of an extensive hunt in Maguindanao by military units.

The 6th ID has earlier tagged MILF forces as behind two recent attempts to blast improvised explosive devices at the premises of the Nabundas Elementary School at the border of Maguindanao’s neighboring Shariff Aguak and Mamasapano towns.

Tension in Maguindanao, where soldiers have been running after renegade MILF rebels for almost a year now, escalated anew after mortar rounds exploded at populated areas in Datu Piang and in Talayan, both in Maguindanao, killing an evacuee and causing serious injuries to many others.

The MILF’s website, www.luwaran.net, has accused soldiers of shelling the populated areas.

Ponce said it was renegade forces of the MILF that fired the mortars as part of a maneuver meant to embarrass the military in the wake of next week’s fact-finding mission by various non-government organizations on the plight of evacuees in different evacuation sites in Maguindanao. – With Cecille Suerte Felipe