2 dead in BARMM election-related gunfights, 7 gunmen detained

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Policemen and soldiers on Saturday, May 10, arrested seven from an armed group that figured in gunfights with a rival partisan faction in Pandag, Maguindanao del Sur that left a candidate for municipal councilor and a student dead.

The seven gunmen and their companions first traded shots with personnel of units under the Maguindanao del Sur Provincial Police Office and the Army’s 2nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion who responded to the incident before they yielded when they noticed that they had been surrounded and could be killed if they resisted arrest.  

Moro community leaders had told reporters on Sunday, May 11, that the companions of the seven gunmen, now locked in a police detention facility, had escaped towards another barangay, bringing with them their military-type combat weapons. 

Officials of the Pandag Municipal Police Station and the Maguindanao Provincial Police Office confirmed to reporters on Sunday that two villagers, Emran Tumbah Mamalinta, a candidate for municipal councilor in Pandag, and a male student, Alkama Kilam Maslama, got killed in the crossfire between the two groups, each identified with feuding local politicians locked in a deep-seated political rivalry.

An old Moro woman, who was hit by stray bullets as the two partisan groups clashed in Barangay Kabuling in Pandag, was rushed by emergency responders to a hospital for treatment.

Brig. Gen. Romeo Juan Macapaz, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, and Army Major Gen. Donald Gumiran, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, had separately announced that the joint military-police peacekeeping teams they sent to Pandag had seized from the seven gunmen three M16 rifles, two .30 caliber M1 Garand rifles, an M653 rifle and an M203 rifle fitted with a 40 millimeter grenade launcher.

Pandag is a far-flung town in the politically hostile Maguindanao del Sur, one of the five provinces in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Gumiran has ordered the commanding officer of the 2nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion, Lt. Col. Felmax Lodriguito Jr.  and his immediate superior, Col. Ronel Manalo of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Brigade, to investigators dispatched to Pandag by Macapaz build airtight criminal cases against members of the two groups behind the atrocities in the area that sent villagers running for their lives.