Source: Maguindanao massacre suspect coddling Usman in Mamasapano

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines - The wounded bomb maker Abdul Basit Usman is still in Maguindanao's Mamasapano town, moving from one swampy area to another to avoid detection, rebel sources on Saturday said.

Local folks, speaking on terms of anonymity for security reasons, said a moneyed suspect in the infamous Nov. 23, 2009 Maguindanao massacre has been providing Usman with food and antibiotics for the wounds he sustained in an encounter with members of the police’s Special Action Force on January 25 in Barangay Inog-og in Mamasapano.

Usman, an ethnic Maguindanaon, was said to have undergone training in handling of explosives and fabrication of improvised bombs in Kandahar, Afganistan and in Peshawar Pakistan in the 1990s.

Moro community leaders said Usman, known in Mamasapano as “Teng,” was indeed wounded in an encounter with SAF operatives that killed in a dawn raid last January 25 Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, most known as Marwan.

The house of Marwan in Barangay Inog-og is only about 50 meters away from Usman’s shanty.

“He is treating his wounds with antibiotics supplied by a benefactor, someone who was implicated in the Maguindanao massacre,” one of the sources said in the Maguindanaon dialect.

Usman was known in Mamasapano as a close aide of Marwan, who was said to have trained more than 300 recruits in the past three years, some of them Yakans from Basilan and Tausogs from Sulu.

“Before January 25 he (Usman) was always at the market at Sharif Aguak to buy food supplies for Marwan as if he is not a wanted person,” a 53-year-old peasant said.

The public market of Sharif Aguak, the old provincial capital of Maguindanao, is near the provincial police office and the headquarters of the Army’s 1st Mechanized Brigade.

A barangay official said Marwan was buried in Dasikil, an agricultural area at the border of Mamasapano and nearby Rajah Buayan town, also in Maguindanao.

“He was buried there a day after he was killed by policemen,” said the source.

Local officials in Rajah Buayan said residents of Dasikil had confirmed that Marwan was indeed buried in an unmarked grave in the area.

Usman is wanted for his involvement in deadly bombings in Central Mindanao.

“He is just moving now from one area to another in Mamasapano, at the border of Datu Piang and Salibo (municipalities),” a source said in Maguindanaon vernacular.

A grains trader said Usman is a friend of an armed group led by a suspect in the Maguindanao massacre.

Barangay folks dislocated by the January 25 hostilities between policemen and MILF members in Mamasapano said it was too unbelievable that most local officials never knew of Marwan and Usman’s presence in the municipality.

An aide of Usman last bought Cloxacillin antibiotics for him in Isulan, Sultan Kudarat on February 16, another source hinted.

Usman was tagged as behind the February 2003 setting off of a vehicle packed with explosives at the Maguindanao Awang Airport near Camp Siongco in Datu Odin Sinsuat town.

The bombing occurred three days after Marine and Army combatants took over the residential compound at the Buliok Complex in Pagalungan, Maguindanao of the MILF’s founder, Imam Salamat Hashim.

Usman was also implicated in the detonation in June 2005 of a vehicle loaded with explosives and parked along a busy thoroughfare  in the town proper of Sharif Aguak, just as the convoy of then Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan, Jr. was passing by.

The governor survived the explosion unscathed but eight people in separate vehicles trailing behind were killed in the attack, which also injured more than 10 others.