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ZAMBOANGA CITY: Philippine soldiers disarmed Tuesday two powerful
roadside bombs planted by suspected Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
rebels in Maguindanao, officials said.
The explosives, assembled from 90mm and 80mm
mortar bombs, were left on a highway near the village of Magaslong
in Datu Piang town where military patrols frequently pass.
“Members of the army’s explosive ordnance team disarmed the
improvise explosives believed planted by MILF rebels,” said Major
Armand Rico, regional army spokesman.
He said the mortar bombs were connected to radio
transceivers used as a firing device to trigger explosion. “This
technology the rebels are using must have come from the New
People’s Army [NPA] which is notoriously known for using landmines
in attacking military targets,” he said.
Rico was referring to the NPA, the armed wing of
the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines (CCP), accused by
the military of using anti-personnel landmines that is banned around
the world under the Geneva Convention, in carrying out attacks
against security forces. “The use of landmines is banned around
the world, but the NPA continue to use such explosives, and now the
MILF rebels as well and it threatens the safety of innocent
civilians,” he said.
Besides the Geneva Convention, the 1997 Ottawa
Convention, also known as the Mine Ban Treaty, prohibits the use,
stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines. Rico
said the MILF rebels got its technology in the manufacture of
landmines from the NPA.
The Philippine Army said the MILF have forged an
alliance with the NPA as early as 1999. The alliance covers among
others the exchange of information, sharing of training, manufacture
of arms and ammunition, particularly rocket-propelled grenades.
Col. Daniel Lucero, commander of the Army’s
Civil-Military Operations Group, said this explains why the
Mindanao-based NPA rebels were reported to have used anti-tank
rockets, loaned by the MILF, in battling government soldiers. He
said there were many occasions that MILF forces had disrupted
military operations against the NPA in the past. “What is more
revealing in this alliance is the deafening silence and refusal of
the CPP-NPA-NDF and its allied organizations to condemn the terror
acts perpetrated by the MILF rebels [in recent attacks in
Mindanao],” he said.
The MILF, which is fighting for a separate
Muslim homeland, admitted forging an alliance with the NPA, which
has been waging a secessionist war for decades for the establishment
of a Maoist state in the Philippines.
-- Al Jacinto
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