Cops say al-Khobar behind bus bomb

COTABATO CITY—Police here yesterday said they were certain that the al-Khobar extortion group, which has ties with the Abu Sayyaf, was behind the April 11 bombing of a bus in a North Cotabato town that killed three persons and wounded over a dozen others.

Chief Supt. Felicisimo Khu, head of the Directorate for Integrated Police Operations in Western Mindanao, said two al-Khobar members responsible for the bomb attack are now being hunted down.

The target bus, belonging to the transport firm Rural Transit, came from Tacurong City in Sultan Kudarat and was on its way to Cagayan de Oro City when the bomb exploded as it got near a terminal in Carmen town in North Cotabato.

According to Khu, the two suspects who are now being hunted down boarded the bus in Kabacan, another town in North Cotabato, and detonated the bomb in Carmen. “We have a witness that identified the suspects as such (members of al-Khobar),” said the police official.

Khu, however, refused to say how the witness was able to determine that the suspects were members of the extortion group.

Khu admitted that Rural Transit, which owned and operated the bombed bus, has not received any extortion demand immediately prior to the attack.

The transportation firm, however, has received extortion demands in the past that coincided with bomb attacks on its other buses.

This time, “there was no extortion demand,” said Khu.

Khu said police suspected that business rivalry and not extortion was the main reason the bus company was attacked by the al-Khobar, the same group that was responsible for over a dozen bus bombings in Mindanao since 2001.

He said whoever was unhappy over Rural Transit’s presence in the Cagayan de Oro-Tacurong route might have contracted the al-Khobar to attack the bus company. He declined to elaborate on the theory, though.

To prevent a repeat of the April 11 attack, Khu said police asked the Rural Transit management to prohibit bus drivers from picking up passengers outside terminals. Reports from Jeoffrey Maitem and Dennis Santos, Inquirer Mindanao