8 Maute militants bolt Lanao del Sur jail

COTABATO CITY — Islamic militants armed with AK-47 Kalashnikovs and M-14 rifles rescued eight companions from the Lanao del Sur provincial jail in a daring attack at dusk Saturday.

 

The gunmen belong to the Maute terror group led by Abdullah Maute, an ethnic Maranaw who hails from who hails from Butig town in Lanao del Sur.

 

Investigators said the militants arrived at the jail near the old Lanao del Sur provincial capitol in Marawi City, disarmed the guards on duty and set free their eight companions arrested by the police last week in Lumbayanague town in the same province

 

Five of the eight men were identified by responding police probers as Mohammad Mulok, Jamil Amirul, Abdul Jabbar Macabading, and Hassim Balauag, all ethnic Maranaws.

 

Chief Superintendent Agripino Javier, police director for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, on Sunday told The STAR they have launched an extensive hunt for the group that raided the provincial jail and the detainees they have sprung from detention.

 

Marawi City officials said the group also freed more than 20 other inmates as a diversionary ploy.

 

Most of them were jailed for drug offenses, theft and murder cases, according to members of the Marawi City peace and order council.

 

The Maute group, which first emerged early this year in the hinterlands in Butig, boasts of its allegiance to the Independent State of Iraq and Syria.

 

Its members, armed with assault rifles and B-40 rocket launchers, carry black ISIS flags when they move around.

 

The group had earlier beheaded two non-Muslim captives snatched in one of the barangays in Butig on suspicions they were government spies.

 

Maranaw peace activists had called on President Rodrigo Duterte to immediately relieve from their posts the chief of the Marawi City police and the provincial police director of Lanao del Sur.

 

Heavily armed members of the Maute terror group killed a soldier and wounded two others in an attack near the headquarters of the Army’s 103rd Brigade in July this year.

 

The attackers even detonated a powerful improvised explosive device at one side of the fenced Army base as they fled from the scene.