You can’t win ’em all. But the President’s Senate candidates might just win over to their side the province that gave Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s candidates a questionable 12-0 sweep in the 2007 elections—this time legitimately, Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu said on Friday.
Bonnet-wearing gunmen harassed a group of local politicians campaigning in Kabuntalan Mother town in Maguindanao on Wednesday, two days before President Benigno Aquino III campaigns for Liberal Party senatorial candidates in the province.
President Aquino is scheduled to proclaim on Friday the candidates of the ruling Liberal Party, led by incumbent Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu in Buluan town.
A political clan in Maguindanao is planning to file a case against those behind the issuance of a search warrant by a Manila trial court on the residence of Talayan Mayor Tongkang Midtimbang who was suspected of keeping an arsenal of high-powered firearms in his house.
Three foreign governments on Friday joined the commemoration of the third anniversary of the Maguindanao massacre and reminded the Philippine government, which seemed to have forgotten the event, about its promise to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Malacañang ruled out, on Thursday, the lifting of a state of emergency in Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat and Cotabato City, which was imposed in November 2009, by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the aftermath of the Maguindanao massacre.
Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu on Wednesday said the memorial site where 58 people were massacred in 2009 had been burglarized.
Hired assassins are stalking witnesses to the Maguindanao massacre in which a political warlord allegedly led the slaughter of 57 people, victims’ relatives and a rights group said almost two years into a complex trial.
Maguindanao Governor Esmael “Toto” Mangudadatu on Thursday affirmed that his wife had told him in their last phone conversation that armed men led by Andal Ampatuan Jr. had abducted her and 56 others before all were found brutally murdered on a hill outside Ampatuan town, Maguindanao, three years ago.
The blame game has started over the jailbreak last Tuesday at the Maguindanao provincial jail here, in which 11 prisoners, including a notorious bandit leader, escaped from the prison.
A heated exchange broke out between lawyers in what appeared to be attempts at backdoor talks among the prosecution and defense panels in the Maguindanao massacre case.
A Philippine governor said that his political rival and the main suspect in the 2009 election-related killings of 57 people tried to kill him and his brothers months before the massacre, calling him “powerful, influential and violent.”
Maguindanao Governor Esmael Mangudadatu would rather see those responsible for the killing of his wife meted out the death penalty, but when asked in court yesterday what price he would put for the suffering it had caused him, he mentioned P100 million at the very least.
