3 wounded in ambush of mayor's convoy
LANAO DEL SUR --- Three companions of a municipal mayor, one of them a policeman, were wounded in an ambush in Buadipuso Buntong town on Sunday.
Mayor Nasser Pangandaman, Jr. of Masiu, Lanao del Sur survived the attack unscathed.
Col. Madzgani Mukaram, director of the Lanao del Sur provincial police, said gunmen positioned at one side of the road in Barangay Gata in Buadipuso Buntong opened fire at Pangandaman’s convoy and scampered away immediately.
Pangandaman’s three companions, Police Staff Sgt. Jabbar Romato Pangandaman, Jamal Gabriel Pangandaman and Casanoding Mangandog sustained bullet wounds in the abdomen, right knee and lower buttocks, respectively.
Mukaram said the mayor and his escorts were en route to the town proper of Masiu from Marawi City when gunmen shot their vehicles with assault rifles while in transit at a stretch of the Marawi-Masiu Highway in Barangay Gata.
Personnel of the provincial police’s Mobile Force Company and servicemen of the Army’s 82ndInfantry Battalion are still out searching for the ambushers, overhead arguing with each other in Maranaw dialect over their having missed their target, the mayor, as they fled from the scene.