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ZAMBOANGA CITY—Suspected Abu Sayyaf bandits burned the two-room kindergarten building of the Tipo-tipo Central Elementary School in Basilan at dawn Sunday.
Major General Rainier Cruz, chief of the Army’s First Division, said the burning of the school was meant to ease the military’s pressure against the bandit group in the neighboring town of Sumisip, site of a recent clash that left 10 soldiers killed.
Tipo-Tipo town is about five kilometers away from Sumisip.
Cruz said no one was reported hurt and that villagers helped in putting out the fire.
Colonel Arthur Ang, commander of the 104th Brigade, also said the burning of the school was “a way to divert our troops who are pursuing the lawless elements in Sumisip.”
“They were also hoping they can inflict harm by ambushing our troops who might be responding to the burning this dawn,” Ang added.
Before noon Sunday, Ang said he received an assurance from Tipo-tipo Mayor Ingatun Estarul that there will be classes on Monday as only two rooms were affected by the fire.
Col. Ramon Yogyog, chief of the Joint Special Operations Task Force Basilan, said they could not “easily identify” those behind the burning of the school due to the “absence of law enforcers in the area.”
Operations against the bandit group continue in Sumisip, Ang said.
“We believe they are just there, hiding in the mountainous areas of Sumisip,” Ang said.
But Yogyog said “there was lull in the battlefront.”
“We pulled out our troops to secure back the perimeters of the cooperative plantations, especially those cooperatives that received regular threats from the Abu Sayyaf Group,” he said.
Yogyog said the government troops were on a “re-supply mode.”
“But their intelligence gathering has been intensified in the area with the help from the villagers,” he said.
On Thursday last week, 10 soldiers were killed and 17 others wounded in a clash with armed men who were harassing rubber plantation workers in Sumisip town.
Col. Randolph Cabangbang, spokesman of Western Mindanao Command, said some members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), acting on their own, might retaliate after the reported death of three members of the Asnawi family.
Dan Laksaw Asnawi, a commander of the MILF in Basilan, is a brother Hassan and Nurham Asnawi, who were reportedly killed in the clash. Jumaidi Asnawi, a son of Hassan, was also reported killed in last week’s clash.
Cabangbang said 13 bandits were killed in the Sumisip clash.
But Jerry Aklamin, a member of the Basilan-based human rights group Kahapan, said only three bandits, none of them members of the Asnawi clan, were killed.
But he said some members of the Asnawi clan were wounded.
Taha Katoh, manager of Tumahubong Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Integrated Development Cooperative Inc., (Tarbidci), told the Inquirer that only four bandits, including former cooperative workers Wims Wakil and Juhair Bottong, were killed in the clash.
Cabangbang, in defending his figures, said it could be that Katoh “only recognized four of those killed, not necessarily claiming that only four were killed.”