30 Lanao Sur Dawlah members face criminal charges
TIMRA Reports • 08:45 AM Sat Apr 23, 2022
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By:
John M. Unson
Parts of Lanao del Sur are known hotbeds of religious extremism.
COTABATO CITY - The Criminal Investigation and Detection Group charged Thursday 30 members of the Dawlah Islamiya group with violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.
Major Esmael Madin, provincial officer for Lanao del Sur of the CIDG-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, said Friday the group figured in bloody encounters with units of the Army’s 103rd Infantry Brigade in Maguing town last month.
A soldier, Pvt. Clint Rey Armada, and seven of its members were killed in the hostilities then in Maguing, located in the first district of Lanao del Sur.
Madin said they charged with murder, frustrated murder, illegal possession of firearms and explosives and violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 the 30 Dawlah Islamiya members before the Lanao del Sur Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Marawi City.
The CIDG-Lanao del Sur presented as evidence in prosecuting the group, led by the religious extremist Faharudin Hadji Satar, the assault rifles and explosives they left in their lair in Barangay Ilatag in Maguing as they fled after heavy exchanges of gunfire with personnel of the Army’s 55th Battalion.
The hostilities left a soldier, Pvt. Ariel Bahala wounded.
The Dawlah Islamiya in Lanao del Sur is operating in the fashion of the Islamic State of Iraq And Syria.
Many of its members were former loyal followers of the slain siblings Omarkhayam and Abdullah Maute, founders of the Maute terror group that instigated the bloody May 23 to October 16, 2017 conflict in Marawi City.
Their five-month siege of Marawi City resulted in the death of no fewer than a thousand people, more than a hundred of them soldiers and policemen, displaced some 300,000 villagers and left a dozen centuries-old, historic Maranao enclaves in ruins.