Davao bombing suspect nabbed in Cotabato City has shady persona

COTABATO CITY --- Friends and relatives here of the principal suspect in the deadly Sept. 2 bombing in Davao City were suspicious he was into something very mysterious long before his arrest here last week.

Neighbors had also confirmed having repeatedly heard elders of arrested suspect TJ Tagadaya Macabalang reprimand him over links” with jihadist groups before the bombing, which left 15 dead and injured more than 60 others.
Relatives of Macabalang were also overheard confronting him, in months prior, for entertaining calls from people who could not speak and understand local vernaculars, apparently foreigners.Macabalang, owner of a local computer-generated graphics designing outfit, and his worker, Wendell Facturan, were arrested here on October 6 by plainclothes intelligence operatives.A third suspect, Musali Mustapha, was arrested earlier somewhere else.Macabalang, also into buy-and-sell of used motorcycles, and Facturan, a mechanic, agreed to meet the agents, disguised as buyers, near a bank at the city’s uptown, where they were eventually arrested in an entrapment local radio stations here first reported as possibly a kidnapping incident.Neighbors of Macabalang at the Krislamville area here said they knew he and Facturan were arrested” when radio reports about their abduction circulated next day. We knew they were not kidnapped as insinuated by some broadcasters who reported the incident as a simple police story, said a government employee residing near Macabalang’s house.Even customers of Macabalang’s roadside establishment here, the Stickerwekrz Printshoppe, detected his shady personality even before the Sept. 2 bombing in Davao City. We started to have doubts on his persona, particularly on his religious activities, when we learned he was frequented by bearded men from the provinces of Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat and Lanao del Sur,” said a former customer in his establishment.The source, who asked to be identified only as Kim, said he and his colleagues in a motorcycle club stopped patronizing Macabalang’s decorative sticker business when they noticed he was always visited by men who spoke so much about jihad and the concepts of a puritan Islamic state.Operatives of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group found improvised explosive devices and firearms in the house Macabalang a day after he was reportedly abducted” by unidentified men.The regional office of the CIDG in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao is now in custody of the IEDs and firearms collected from the house of Macabalang.Macabalang’s father, Teng, an ethnic Maguindanaon, who was inside the suspect’s house when the agents arrived to conduct the search, is now clamped down at the CIDG-ARMM’s detention facility.Also recovered from the scene were a vintage World War II carbine .30 caliber rifle, a .45 caliber pistol and a bolt-action rim-fire .22 caliber hunting rifle mounted with a sniping scope.Relatives of Macabalang said they have been hearing stories about his connection with Middle Eastern jihadist groups, but did not mind owing to lack of corroborating proofs.His detained father had told reporters that he, too, heard of his son’s alleged linkages with religious extremists in the Middle East.