COTABATO CITY, Philippines — A grenade blast ripped through the surroundings of the office here of the Bangsamoro regional health minister at almost midnight Saturday, October 12.
Villagers in houses around the office and clinic in Zenaida Subdivision in Cotabato City of the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Monera Sinolinding Jr. said on Sunday morning that the bombing was perpetrated by two men riding a motorcycle together.
Officials of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, the Army’s 6th Infantry Division and the Navy's 5th Marine Battalion, which are cooperating in maintaining law and order in Cotabato City, separately told reporters on Sunday that the grenade attack was possibly only meant to scare Sinolinding.
Sinolinding has no known enemies and is popular for his humanitarian missions benefiting poor Muslims, Christians and members of non-Moro indigenous tribes afflicted with cataract, pterygium and other eye problems.
Police bomb experts and an ordnance disposal team from the 5th Marine Battalion, whose headquarters is just a block away from the blast scene, recovered fragments of what could either be an M61 or MK2 fragmentation grenade that went off on the ground about three meters away from the entrance to the office and clinic of Sinolinding.
Sinolinding, who was designated as regional health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao only last May by BARMM's chief minister, Ahod Balawag Ebrahim, was appointed as member of the region's 80-seat parliament by President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. in August 2022.
He had also served as regional health secretary of the now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which got replaced with a more empowered BARMM via a plebiscite in 2019, a product of 22 years of peace talks between Malacañang and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.