Dawlah Islamiya behind deadly worship rite bombing? Some say so

COTABATO CITY - Four Christian worshipers got killed while 42 others were hurt when a powerful explosion ripped through a gymnasium in a state-run university in Marawi City on Sunday morning.

Non-Muslim students and faculty members of the Mindanao State University in Marawi City, the capital of Lanao del Sur, are free to use the large gymnasium on their campus for Sunday worship rites and during religious holidays.

The bombing was preceded by Saturday’s clash in Barangay Tuayan in Datu Hofer, Maguindanao del Sur between members of the outlawed Dawlah Islamiya and personnel of units under the Army’s 601^st Infantry Brigade that left 11 terrorists dead, their corpses all accounted for, promptly turned over to local officials for proper burial.

Lanao del Sur Gov. Mamintal Adiong Jr., citing reports by officials of their Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, or PDRRMO, said four worshipers immediately died from the blast that injured 42 others, now in different hospitals.

“I condemn this atrocity in the strongest terms and I will flex my authority, as provincial governor of Lanao del Sur, in helping the police and military identify its perpetrators,” Adiong said while in a hospital where emergency responders brought several injured worshipers for treatment.

Brig. Gen. Allan Nobleza, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, said their ordnance disposal experts in Lanao del Sur and counterparts in the Army’s 103^rd Infantry Brigade are together trying to determine the type of the improvised explosive device used in the bomb attack.

Responding police probers found fragments of metals with sharp jagged edges and pieces of what looked like small cuts of round construction support bars scattered inside the bombed-out gymnasium.

“But we can’t do factual conclusions fast. We have to give our ordnance men and police forensic experts enough time to wrap up their effort to determine the kind of explosive used in the bombing of that gymnasium,” Nobleza said.

Local officials, citing accounts of victims, said they are convinced that the IED was detonated from a distance using a mobile phone.

There are former members of the long-decimated Maute terror group that laid siege to Marawi City from May 23 to October 16, 2017, in the Dawlah Islamiya who are experts in the fabrication of IEDs using potassium chlorate, or the strictly regulated ammonium nitrate fertilizer as blasting charges.

Adiong said his administration shall provide all blast victims with essential humanitarian support.