Teacher, nurse dead in central Mindanao ambush incidents

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — A public school teacher and a government nurse were killed in separate ambush incidents Friday in central Mindanao’s neighboring Maguindanao del Norte and Cotabato provinces.

The first to perish in the two separate atrocities is Joel Reformado, 36, a teacher, who was shot dead by ambushers near the campus of the Maulanan Elementary School in Barangay Malaunan in Pikit, Cotabato.

Lt.Col. John Miridel Calinga, Pikit municipal police chief, told reporters Saturday Reformado and a co-teacher, Elton John Lapined, were riding a motorcycle together when gunmen positioned along the road shot them with pistols.

Lapined was critically wounded in the attack, now confined in a hospital.

The municipality of Pikit has been hitting the news for more than two years now owing to the seemingly never ending deadly gun attacks and clashes among heavily armed warring Moro groups in the area.

Records from the Police Regional Office-12 and the Army’s 602nd Infantry Brigade indicate that 42 people had been murdered one after another by gunmen in different barangays in Pikit since late 2020, about 90 percent of the deadly incidents unsolved, no culprits arrested or prosecuted in court.

The second ambush fatality on Friday is a 35-year-old nurse, Sarifa Kabagani Gulam of the Cotabato Sanitarium Hospital in Pinaring in Sultan Kudarat town in Maguindanao del Norte.

Gulam and her husband, Samir, 35, were on board their white Mitsubishi Montero, on their way home to San Pablo Village here from her workplace when men with assault rifles at one side of the highway in Barangay Ungap, Sultan Kudarat opened fire as they got close.

Lt. Col. Julhamin Asdani, chief of the Sultan Kudarat municipal police, said Friday Gulam died instantly from bullet wounds that she sustained in the nighttime attack that left her spouse badly wounded.

Asdani said investigators are out to identify the gunmen behind the couple’s ambush for prosecution.