Police foil plot to bomb South Cotabato festival

KORONADAL CITY, Philippines – Police foiled a bombing plot in the last day of South Cotabato’s Tinalak Festival and 44th founding anniversary celebration today with the seizure of a powerful explosive and the arrest of the suspected bomber in a nearby town, authorities said.

Based on police intelligence reports, the plot was supposed to be pulled off at the height of today’s festivities, said Superintendent Barney Condes, intelligence chief of the provincial police.

Condes said the improvised explosive, made from a 60-millimeter live mortar shell, was seized in the house of a certain Jim Bakil, alias Jim Sulaiman, in Barangay Bunao, Tupi town last Friday.

Condes said the bomb had a meter reading and blasting cap and was packed with a kilo of nails.

“Hundreds of people would have been killed if it exploded in crowded places,” he said.

Koronadal is a component city of South Cotabato and the administrative center of Central Mindanao.

Condes said they would file charges against Bakil today.

Bakil denied the charge though, claiming that the seized explosive was just left in his house by a certain Ting Mawanao.

“I’m not a bomber. The explosive was just left in my house. I’m innocent,” Bakil told Bombo Radyo here in Filipino.

Chief Superintendent Felicisimo Khu, Central Mindanao police director, lauded the South Cotabato police for “a job well done,” saying, “You have averted a (possible) bloody incident.”