Villagers concerned about armed Ampatuan followers roaming in Maguindanao

MANILA, Philippines - Barangay folks want authorities to look into the presence of a third group - the fugitive former followers of the Ampatuan clan - in Maguindanao towns where the extremist Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) operates.

Community elders said besides the forces of the MILF and BIFF, gunmen employed before in the now defunct Ampatuan clan militia, many of them led by family members wanted in connection with the Nov. 23, 2009 “Maguindanao Massacre,” have also been roaming freely in towns which the military is trying to clear from Moro bandits.

Even the spokesman of the BIFF, Abu Misry Mama, conveniently tags  them as the "massacre group" whenever he speaks about their presence in areas where fanatic followers of Mohammad Ali Tambako and Imam Ameril Ombra Kato are holding out.

Kato, a former senior leader of the MILF, is the founder of the BIFF. Tambako helped Kato establish the group, but bolted in December last year and launched his self-styled Justice for Islamic Movement.

Tambako, arrested two weeks ago by police and Army agents in Barangay Calumpang in Gen. Santos City, had coddled the slain Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, also known as Marwan, and his ethnic Maguindanaon cohort, the foreign-trained bomber Abdul Basit Usman.

“Nandiyan lang sila, armado at gumagala-gala. Tuwing may mga dumarating na mga sundalong humahabol sa BIFF ay lumalayo lang sila, umiiwas sa mga sundalo,” said 50-year-old farmer Omar Sapal, referring to the former members of the Ampatuan private army.

Sapal and his family are among more than 20,000 families now cramped in evacuation sites in Maguindanao towns rocked by military-BIFF encounters in the past four weeks.

The gunmen soldiers fought with in Datu Piang town last March 23 were not BIFF members but followers of the Ampatuan clan, according to local executives.

Two innocent villagers, Abubakar Haola, 18, and 62-year-old Hadji Mokamad, were wounded in the crossfire.

Local officials in Maguindanao’s adjoining Datu Piang, Salibo, Mamasapano, and Datu Unsay towns said the encounter in Barangay Alunganen last Monday afternoon involved well-armed suspects in the Maguindanao Massacre and soldiers pursuing BIFF bandits in the area.

“It was more of a chance encounter. The soldiers and the massacre suspects got close to each other by chance and traded shots immediately,” said a municipal mayor, who asked not to be identified.

The local executive said some of the gunmen in the armed group were, in fact, his relatives.

“But I am not with them. I don’t support them either because as an elected official I am loyal to my oath to uphold the Constitution at all cost,” the mayor said.

Haola and Mokamad were both wounded when the gunmen shot houses in the surroundings as they scampered away from Barangay Alunganen, located in the southeast of Datu Piang.

Datu Piang Mayor Genuine Kamaong said his office has been providing monetary assistance to his two constituents wounded in the incident, now confined at the Maguindanao provincial hospital in Sharif Aguak town.

Talks are rife that gunmen employed in the private militias of the Ampatuan clan, which is hostile to both the BIFF and the MILF, were involved in the January 25 deadly foray in Mamasapano town.

At least 44 Special Action Force commandos, 17 MILF rebels and five civilians were killed then, which is become what is now known as the “Mamasapano incident.”

“These now fragmented groups of members of the Ampatuan private army seemed closer and could even be tactically allied with the group of Abdul Basit Usman, not with either the BIFF or the MILF,” said a town councilor.

Usman, an ethnic Maguindanaon trained in fabrication of improvised bombs in Peshawar, Pakistan and Kandahar, Afganistan during the 1990s, was a cohort of slain Malaysian terrorist Zulkfili bin Hir alias Marwan.

Another source, related by blood to the Ampatuans, said the detained leader of the clan, former Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr., has a grandson, also a principal suspect in the massacre of 58 people five years ago, who has just been hiding from one area to another in the towns where the BIFF and the military figured in encounters in weeks past.

One of the former governor’s grandsons, also implicated in the carnage, was voluntarily surrendered by clan elders after having been paralyzed from waist down due to injuries sustained in a premature explosion of an improvised explosive more than two years ago, while allegedly in the company of foreign-trained bomb makers.

The maimed massacre suspect is now clamped down in a police detention facility in Taguig, along with a brother and other Ampatuans tagged as behind the massacre, the country’s worst election-related violence ever.

There were stories purporting that the improvised explosive device that went off accidentally was intended for another Ampatuan, who is an adversary of the immediate family of the governor’s grandson who was injured in the blast.

Local folks, among them peasants now in squalid evacuation sites in towns affected by the military’s continuing anti-BIFF maneuvers since March 1, said the fugitive followers of the Ampatuans are better armed than those in the BIFF and the MILF.