3 hurt in North Cotabato grenade attack

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines - Three more were injured in another grenade blast in North Cotabato’s Matalam town before dawn Tuesday, the second in three days and the fifth in the province in a span of three weeks.

The victims, Jeffrey Onoc, 23, Bernie Cristobal, 34, and Benito Samillano, 49, were in a wake of a deceased relative in a roadside mortuary when someone hurled at them a fragmentation grenade and ran away.

Police investigators are yet to determine the identity of the bomber and the exact motive for the attack.

Responding policemen and barangay officials rushed Onoc, Cristobal and Samillano, who sustained shrapnel wounds in their bodies, to a nearby hospital.

Five Matalam residents were injured over the weekend when a motorcycle-riding bomber tossed a fragmentation grenade inside a tricycle while at a busy section of a highway straddling through the center of the municipality.

North Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza, presiding chair of the provincial peace and order council, ordered local officials in Matalam and the provincial police director, Senior Superintendent Alex Tagum, to cooperate in establishing the identities of the culprits in the two grenade attacks.

Three grenade explosions earlier rocked the town proper of Kabacan, also in North Cotabato, which injured five people all, among them a four-year-old child.

The mayor of Kabacan, Herlo Guzman, and Mendoza had both promised to shell out earnest rewards for any information that could lead to the arrest of the people responsible for the three successive grenade attacks.

Mendoza and local officials in Matalam are to meet soon to discuss measures needed to stave off a repeat of the two bombings in the municipality.