Cop hurt in Cotabato bomb blast

COTABATO CITY, Philippines—A police officer was slightly injured while verifying a reported discovery of an improvised explosive device near a popular coffee shop here Friday morning.

Supt. Roberto Badian, Cotabato City police chief, identified the injured policeman as P03 Jose Gomez.

Badian said Gomez had received a report that a bomb had been left on a roadside, about 10 meters from Café Florencio, and went to check out the report at around 9:30 a.m. He was approaching the device when it exploded.

Badian said Gomez suffered minor shrapnel injury on the left arm.

“The injury was not serious,” he said.

Police investigators, Badian said, initially suspected that the IED was either fashioned from a 60-millimeter mortar shell or ammonium nitrate and may have been remotely detonated.

“It was a very powerful bomb. Everything was shaking here; we were stunned,” an air conditioner technician working at a nearby shop said.

Badian said the police, which had been on heightened alert following intelligence information about possible terror attacks here and in other areas, could still not say who planted the bomb or what the motive was.

In Zamboanga City, police could still not say if Wednesday night’s explosion and the discovery of two more bombs were related to military operations in Payao, Zamboanga Sibugay, and Al Barka in Basilan.

“We cannot declare outright that the explosion was related to the ongoing operation because we are still conducting further investigation,” said Senior Supt. Edwin De Ocampo, Zamboanga City’s acting police chief.

One person was killed—not two as Ocampo had earlier reported—when an IED went off inside an eatery in Barangay Sangali around 9:15 p.m. while police bomb experts were trying to deactivate another bomb nearby.

A third bomb was also recovered in the same area on the same night.

(With reports from Charlie Señase and Julie S. Alipala, Inquirer Mindanao)