Maguindanao roadside bombing blamed on BIFF `robbery gang'

MAGUINDANAO --- A soldier was hurt in a bombing Thursday in Datu Hoffer town, an attack authorities blamed on cohorts of motorcycle thieves killed by policemen in Isulan, Sultan Kudarat the day before.Senior Superintendent Agustin Tello, Maguindanao’s provincial police director, identified the injured soldier as Corporal Michael Madazza of the Army’s 38thInfantry Battalion, a component unit of the 6thInfantry Division.Madazza and his companions were on board a military KM 150 light truck passing by a stretch of the Cotabato-Isulan Highway in Barangay Labo-Labo in Datu Hofer, Maguindanao when a roadside bomb, apparently detonated from a distance using mobile phone, went off.Responding bomb experts had confirmed that the improvised explosive device used in the attack was a prototype of the IEDs used by the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) in all of its roadside bombings in central Mindanao.The bombing at about 7:45 a.m. Thursday in Datu Hoffer was preceded by Wednesday’s encounter between policemen and two motorcycle thieves in Barangay Kenram in Isulan town in Sultan Kudarat, about 30 kilometers southwest of Datu Hoffer.The suspects, armed with pistols, were killed in a brief gunfight with personnel of the Isulan municipal police after robbing a resident, Florencio Vivencio, of his motorcycle in a road heist in another barangay in the same municipality.Senior Superintendent Raul Supiter of the Sultan Kudarat provincial police office said the policemen who chased the two men were to arrest them both peacefully after cornering them in Barangay Dansul, Isulan but were forced to neutralize them when they resisted and opened fire.Army intelligence officials said the slain motorcycle thieves -- Amir Toten Ato and Maguid Upam Usop -- belong to a group of BIFF bandits engaged in armed robbery and extortion as part of the group’s fund-raising scheme.Ranking officials of police and Army intelligence units said the roadside bombing in Datu Hoffer was to avenge the deaths of the duo, both from Mamasapano town in Maguindanao.Their cadavers were claimed at past 10:00 a.m. from the Sultan Kudarat provincial police by a relative named Abdulatip Ali, also a resident of Mamasapano.Mamasapano is a known lair of the BIFF, which boasts of allegiance to the Independent State of Iraq and Syria and is using the black ISIS flag as its revolutionary banner.