NPA grab deputy police chief of North Cotabato town

KIDAPAWAN CITY, Philippines — Communist rebels snatched the deputy police chief of President Roxas town in North Cotabato late Thursday.

 

Inspector Menardo Cui was off duty and drinking with friends at the HMB Videoke Bar in the town proper of President Roxas when gunmen arrived, herded him at gunpoint to their vehicle and hurriedly left.

 

Local officials said Cui is a resident of Magpet town in the same province.  

 

Personnel of the Army’s 39th Infantry Battalion and the provincial police have launched a search for the group that snatched Cui.

 

There is strong presence of the New People’s Army in North Cotabato’s neighboring Magpet, President Roxas and Arakan towns. In 2014, NPA guerrillas attacked police station of President Roxas town but the 14 officers in the station managed to fight them off.

 

Superintendent Bernard Tayong, spokesman of the North Cotabato provincial police, on Friday said intelligence agents are now trying to find the NPA group that snatched Cui.

 

Officials of the 39th IB are certain Cui's abductors are NPA guerillas.

 

Captain Silver Belvis, spokesman of the 39th IB, said they have enlisted the help of community elders in the three towns to help look for Cui and his captors.

 

The Communist Party of the Philippines celebrated its 49th founding anniversary this week. In its anniversary statement, the party said its forces, including the NPA, ust work "(to) frustrate the plan of the US-Duterte regime to defeat the NPA before the end of 2018," which it said the government plans to do by "[concentrating] its attacks first in the guerrilla fronts in the eastern and other Mindanao regions and then on Luzon and Visayas."

 

The party also urged its guerrillas to overstretch government forces "through different types of coordination in order to carry out counter campaigns of annihilation and attrition at the interregional, regional and subregional levels, particularly in wide areas with thousands of barrios and hundreds of thousands of mass support covered by interlocking guerrilla fronts." — with a report by Artemio Dumlao