Gunman dead, highway patrol cop wounded in Sultan Kudarat shootout

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — A policeman killed in a shootout on Saturday night, January 11, one of two motorcycle-riding gunmen who attacked him while driving an impounded vehicle he was to turn over to their headquarters in Isulan, Sultan Kudarat.

Lt. Col. Julius Malcontento, Isulan municipal police chief, told reporters on Sunday, January 12, that Police Master Sgt. Jenathan Mastura Waguia, a member of the Sultan Kudarat Provincial Highway Patrol Team of the Regional Highway Patrol Unit-12, was wounded in the incident and is now confined at the Sultan Kudarat Provincial Hospital.

Waguia and his companions were in a roadside checkpoint in Barangay Impao in Isulan, waiting for the start after midnight Saturday of the nationwide election-related ban on unauthorized carrying of firearms that they were to enforce on motorists, when they noticed a white minivan without license plates passing by, prompting them to immediately impound the unit.  

He was driving the impounded vehicle to their provincial headquarters in Isulan when gunmen on a motorcycle trailing behind shot him with pistols as they got close.

Waguia sustained a bullet wound in his right upper torso, but was able to return fire, killing one of his attackers, whose identity investigators in the Isulan Municipal Police Station are still trying to determine.

Malcontento and the regional director of the Police Regional Office-12, Brig. Gen. Arnold Ardiente, separately told reporters that investigators and municipal officials are certain that that slain gunman was an accomplice of the owner of the confiscated minivan.