Another blast rocks North Cotabato town

PIKIT, North Cotabato -- Another powerful explosion rocked the town center here Wednesday night, causing panic among local folks.Lt. Col. Audie Edralin, commanding officer of the Army’s 7thInfantry Battalion, said their intelligence operatives are still helping the Pikit municipal police establish the identities of the people responsible for the attack.Barangay officials said there are indications that the bomb was intended for the town’s public terminal, but couriers balked and left it along a road after sensing the heavy presence of policemen and soldiers at strategic spots in the municipality.Edralin said responding members of the Army’s 34thExplosives and Ordnance Unit recovered from the blast scene fragments of a mobile phone and the blasting contraption used in the bomb’s detonation from a distance. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the explosion. Even so, the incident caused tension in the surroundings of the spot where the explosive device exploded,” Edralin said.The incident was preceded by at least three recent bombings in the town proper here, one of which hit a chapel of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, killing two worshipers and wounding five others.Edralin said they have been receiving persistent feedback from local residents that the latest bombing was perpetrated by an armed group opposing Malacanang’s Mindanao peace process.Pikit is near the Liguasan Delta, a known lair of the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), blamed for the recent spate of IED attacks at public places and along highways straddling through isolated areas in the adjoining Maguindanao and North Cotabato provinces.The bombing here Wednesday night occurred less than 24 hours after patrolling policemen found in an abandoned lot in nearby Midsayap, North Cotabato, a live 81 millimeter mortar projectile and an improvised blasting mechanism needed to set it off.Residents of Midsayap, which also near the Liguasan Delta, will celebrate their patronal fiesta on Saturday.The yearly Santo Niño feast in Midsayap is traditionally capped with street dancing parades and various cultural activities attracting thousands of local spectators and tourists from nearby towns in the province. Supt. Reinante Delos Santos, chief of the Midsayap municipal police, said the mortar round, which has an effective blast radius of 30 to 120 meters, was found at a vacant lot at the center of Barangay Poblacion 7. Bomb experts immediately disposed the explosive off,” he said.Delos Santos said probers have initially theorized that the explosive and its blasting mechanism were left at the spot where it was found, to be assembled later for a supposed bomb attack somewhere in Midsayap. (JOHN UNSON)