COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Two ethnic Yakans, from a clan locked in a deep-seated animosity with another, were killed in a daring ambush, in the presence of villagers, in Barangay Marang in Sumisip, Basilan, at about dusk Sunday, October 4.
Local executives and officials of the Sumisip Municipal Police Station separately told reporters on Tuesday that the ambush victims, Husni Hassadin and Uddin Amigos, died instantly from bullet wounds sustained in the attack.
Captain Steffie Salanguit, spokesperson of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, and officials of the Basilan Provincial Police Office separately told reporters on Tuesday that Hassadin and Amigos were riding a motorcycle together when they were attacked by gunmen positioned along a stretch of the highway in Barangay Marang.
Relatives of Hassadin and Amigos had told reporters via text messages that they are certain that the ambush that left both of them dead was perpetrated by members of a clan hostile to their families. They refused to elaborate, however.
The acting municipal police chief of Sumisip, Capt. Jakaria Muin and local executives were quoted in radio reports as saying that relatives of the slain Hassadin and Amigos had traded shots with members of the clan that they accused of having perpetrated the ambush, whose enclave in Sumisip, one of the 11 towns in Basilan, they attacked right after the incident.
No one was reported killed or hurt in their exchanges of gunfire, but the gunshots that reverberated through the surroundings caused panic among innocent villagers.
Policemen and personnel of the Army’s 32nd Infantry Battalion, based in Barangay Tumahubong in Sumisip, immediately intervened and managed to reposition the feuding groups away from each other.
Hassadin and Amigos were killed a day prior to Monday's ambush of a convoy of soldiers in the Bauno Dagao area in Barangay Badja in Basilan's Tipo-Tipo town, not too distant from Sumisip, where 11 soldiers, including an Army lieutenant, from the Army's 45th Infantry Battalion and a Yakan member of the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit were wounded.