Bus passengers foil bombing in Sultan Kudarat

TACURONG CITY, Philippines—Alert passengers of a provincial bus foiled what might have been a bloody act of terrorism here when they found an improvised bomb and quickly notified the authorities, police said.

The incident happened last Tuesday but the police reported it only on Thursday.

Supetrintendent Junny Buenacosa, Tacurong City police chief, said passengers on a Rural Bus Transit bound for Cagayan de Oro noticed a peculiar cardboard box inside the vehicle and called the conductor’s attention to it.

The conductor took the box out of the bus and threw it on a vacant lot away from the terminal, which was then teeming with passengers.

Buenacosa said when Army and police bomb experts inspected the box, it yielded an improvised explosive device fashioned out of a 60-millimeter mortar shell with a mobile phone as triggering device. He said it had been safely disposed of.

Buenacosa said the planting of the IED could have been done by extortion gangs preying on buses plying Central Mindanao.

Dozens of people have been injured in a number of bombings of buses here since 2007 that allegedly had been set off by the Al-Khobar extortion group.

The gang has been linked to foreign-trained bomb expert Bassit Usman.