Defunct ARMM ex-directorate staff dies in Cotabato ambush

COTABATO CITY — A former senior official of a disaster and calamity response outfit of the now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao was killed in an ambush at a busy thoroughfare in Cotabato City on Sunday night.

Engineer Ramil Masukat succumbed to multiple bullet wounds at a hospital where he was brought by emergency responders for treatment.

Masukat survived an ambush unscathed on Nov. 27, 2022 at the border of Shariff Aguak and Mamasapano towns in Maguindanao del Sur but his driver then, Alex Manuel, was not as lucky. He died from gunshot wounds in different parts of his body.

Col. Querubin Lugue Manalang Jr., Cotabato City police director, told reporters on Monday morning that Masukat and his driver were attacked at Rabago Street in Barangay Rosary Heights Mother at about 7 p.m. Sunday by gunmen who immediately escaped using a getaway motorcycle.

Masukat was a former directorate staff of the erstwhile ARMM’s Humanitarian Emergency Action and Response Team, or HEART, renamed Rapid Emergency Action on Disaster Incidence-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao after BARMM’s creation via a plebiscite in January 2019.

The badly wounded Masukat and his companion managed to drive away from the spot where they were attacked and as their vehicle zigzagged through the street, hit several vehicles along the route and stopped at a fuel refilling station close to the Cotabato Police Precinct 2.

The gun attack that resulted in the death of Masukat, who belonged to a large Moro clan in Maguindanao del Sur, was preceded by the January 23 equally brazen murder by two men of a staff of the 80-member BARMM parliament, the 50-year-old Sulaiman Kusain Macabangon, near a mall not too distant from the capitol here of the Bangsamoro region.

Macabangon, an ethnic Iranun who hailed from Barira town in Maguindanao del Norte, worked in the office of Romeo Sema, the representative of the Moro National Liberation Front to the 80-seat regional law-making body.

Macabangon was inside his car parked along the street when two men together on motorcycle approached from behind, opened fire with pistols and immediately sped away. He died on the spot from gunshot wounds in different parts of his body.