Police: No clue on suspects in Cotabato attacks

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines — Investigators are still validating the real motives of the gun attacks in North Cotabato province and in Cotabato City over the weekend that left a government project contractor dead and two tricycle drivers wounded.

Chief Inspector Romy Castanares of the municipal police in President Roxas, a hinterland town in North Cotabato, said investigators still have no clues on who could have killed in an ambush Nilo Sintos, 52, in Barangay Ilustre.

Sintos is a contractor of different road projects of the public works department in peasant enclaves in the municipality.

The victim was riding a motorcycle on his way to the town proper from a project site when gunmen, positioned on one side of the road, flagged him down and shot him with handguns, killing him on the spot.

Local officials said there is a possibility that the culprits belong to the New People's Army, which executes traders and even small entrepreneurs if they refuse to shell out "protection money" on a regular basis.

The fatal ambush of Sintos in a secluded North Cotabato town was preceded by separate shooting incidents in Cotabato City that left tricycle drivers Consejano Hagimit and Justine Rey Munoz wounded.

Hagimit and Munoz were waiting for passengers in different locations in Rosary Heights District in Cotabato City when they were attacked almost simultaneously by pistol-wielding suspects.

The two incidents came after last month's more than a dozen deaths, in one attack after another in Cotabato City, which investigators are still trying to solve.

More than 300 people have been killed in Cotabato City in the past four years in what seemed a never ending saga of gun attacks involving suspected guns-for-hire and protagonists in deadly clan feuds.