NORTH COTABATO - One of the suspects in Tuesday’s bus bombing in Maramag, Bukidnon is a member of the Al-Khobar extortion group, local officials and military sources said Saturday.
Ten passengers were killed while more than 20 others were injured in the bombing of a Rural Tours Mindanao, Inc. (RTMI) bus, the firm’s second in a span of just six weeks.
Bombing suspect Macmod Manibpil hails from M'lang town, which is near the 220,000-hectare Liguasan Delta, a known haven of extortionists and kidnappers.
Television reports on Friday showed authorities pointing to Manibpil as one of the suspects in the latest bombing the RTMI bus.
Manibpil was one of four guerilla ordnance experts that a group of heavily-armed Moro rebels rescued from the North Cotabato provincial jail in Kidapawan City on Feb. 2, 2007.
The gunmen also sprung Datu Ali Sultan from the detention facility. The detainee was said to have undergone a training on the fabrication of home-made bombs in Kandahar in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and his two cohorts named Guido and Mundos.
More than 40 other inmates bolted from the cells during the daring attack at the provincial jail.
Manibpil, Sultan, Guido and Mundos were detained at the provincial jail in connection with their alleged involvement in bombings of buses and commercial establishments in Central Mindanao’s adjoining North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao provinces.
M'lang Mayor Joselito Piñol refuted insinuations that Manibpil is a constituent a reported by television and other media outfits.
Senior Inspector Jiselle Lou Longakit, spokesperson of the Bukidnon provincial police, said Manibpil was also involved in the bombing of a bus in North Cotabato’s Kabacan town in 2006.
Longakit said Manibpil is a member of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), a group of rogue rebels led by radical, foreign-trained clerics.
Army and police intelligence sources in Central Mindanao, however, said Manibpil belonged to the Al-Khobar extortion gang, which had been blamed for a spate of bombings in the region between 2003 and 2010.
The Bukidnon provincial police office said extortion could be the likely angle for Tuesday’s bus bombing in Maramag.
The RTMI management has confirmed having received demands for “protection money” from anonymous sources threatening to bomb its buses..
Piñol said Manibpil is a resident of Barangay Nuangan in Kidapawan City.
Security officials in Maguindanao and North Cotabato are convinced that a big extortion ring, not the BIFF, is behind the RTMI bus bombing.
BIFF spokesperson Abu Misry Mama denied their group's supposed involvement in the attack.
“Most of our men are facing various cases in different courts, mostly trumped up charges, so how can they go out of the towns where we operate? We have become the convenient `whipping boy’ for all atrocities that we didn’t even get involved with,” Misry said in Maguindanaon dialect.
Authorities in Bukidnon and Davao City announced on Thursday that a BIFF leader named Garnet Lintang and a certain Dawtin Gendang had also been criminally charged in connection with Tuesday’s bus bombing.