ARMM extends aid to Wao displaced families

COTABATO CITY -- An emergency team from the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and a local crisis committee joined ranks Wednesday to hasten relief works for families affected by atrocities that rocked Wao, Lanao del Sur over the weekend.Officials dispatched to Wao a contingent from the Humanitarian Emergency Assistance and Response Team (HEART) of the ARMM regional government to provide relief and rehabilitation services to villagers.Six villagers (not seven as earlier reported), among them children and a pregnant woman, were reportedly killed last week in a spate of seemingly related bloody incidents in two barangays in Wao, which spawned tension among local Maranaw and Visayan residents.Eight others were injured in the incidents, precipitated by the reported rape and murder of a Visayan child last Friday and a hacking frenzy that left another minor, who was attacked while watching over family-owned water buffaloes, dead.A group of gunmen attacked a barangay where the suspects were said to have come from next day, killing four villagers, whose houses they reportedly shot with assault rifles and shoulder-fire 40 millimeter shoulder-fire grenades.Lanao del Sur Gov. Mamintal Adiong, Jr., chair of the provincial peace and order council, and the municipal mayor of Wao, Elvino Balicao, organized on Monday a crisis management committee to help the police investigate on the incident and impose measures than can stave off escalation of vendetta killings in the area.Adiong and Balicao had separately called on the public to give them and the police enough time to investigate on the incident to determine the exact identities of the people involved in the killings for them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of law.The HEART contingent will attend to the needs of the villagers affected by the string of deadly attacks in the hinterland town.The team will provide some 300 displaced villagers with food rations and other non-food relief supplies.ARMM Vice Gov. Haroun Al-Rashid Lucman, incumbent regional social welfare secretary, said they will also help defuse the tension in the area.Lucman, himself an ethnic Maranaw from Lanao del Sur, said the chairman of the regional peace and order council, ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman, had ordered the regional police office in Parang, Maguindanao to expedite the filing of criminal charges against the people behind the Wao killings.Hataman had also assured to extend financial assistance to the families of the fatalities and other victims undergoing medication at different hospitals.Balicao, chair of the Wao municipal peace and order council, said he is convinced that a third party” is fomenting animosity between Maranaws and Visayan residents in the municipality.Senior Supt. Agustin Tello, director of the Lanao del Sur provincial police, said probers still have no clues on the identities of the people behind the seemingly related killings.Tello and Adiong had both appealed to the families of the Maranaws killed by masked men in an attack a day after the brutal killings of two Visayan children to refrain from retaliating and let the police prosecute the culprits instead.