ZAMBOANGA CITY—An unusual phone call from her husband brought Nurhidaya Hassan to the horror that struck a fishing community in Basilan which the military raided on March 8 after it was mistaken for an Abu Sayyaf hideout.
Nurhidaya knew something was wrong when her husband, Billamin, called at 5 a.m. and all she heard on the other line were noises, people shouting and her husband pleading for his life, and for children, to be spared.
“I heard him pleading (for mercy),” said Nurhidaya, who stayed at home in Campo Islam here while her husband worked in Tung-umos in Tapiantana Island in Tabuan Lasa town, Basilan.
Tung-umos was the site of a project given members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) by the Bangsamoro Development Authority (BDA), a government agency helping MILF members turn away from a life of war through livelihood projects.
On March 8, it was raided by soldiers on the hunt for members of Abu Sayyaf.
“He was saying it was a fishing village and there were children around,” said Nurhidaya, recalling what she heard on the other line when her husband called.
“I heard loud noises like there were many people moving around him. Then I heard somebody hit him and his phone went off,” Nurhidaya said.
Community project
Billamin, an MILF member since 2001, had been in Tung-umos to lead up to 20 Samal families in a communal fishing project given by the BDA.
Nurhidaya said she heard her husband explaining to someone that he is a member of the MILF.
“Do not fire, we are MILF men, we are not outlaws,” Yasser Patta, 19, recalled hearing Billamin shout as the fishermen were being fired upon.
Patta, who was in his hut in Tung-umos, said fishermen in the community had just finished unloading the day’s catch and praying in a mosque when the soldiers came.
Around 4 a.m., as Patta said he was preparing to go to bed to rest, he heard bursts of gunfire.
A neighbor, Nuruddin Musadul Muhlis, went out to check but was shot when he reached the boardwalk.
Billamin tried to calm the fishermen down as they ducked for cover.
Jainuddin Suddin, another fisherman, said Billamin tried to assure the people that “it would soon be over and settled.”
Billamin continued to plead for the soldiers to stop firing but his plea went unheeded.
Shouts of pain
A child, Ashab Abuhayr, 11, cried out in pain. Two bullets found their mark in his stomach. He is fighting for his life in a hospital.
Shortly after, couple Hussin and Sarima Abbi shouted in horror when they saw their daughter, Nurmaida, a year and seven months old, dead with a bullet wound in the head.
Maj. Gen. Carlito Galvez Jr., Western Mindanao Command chief, had apologized for the wrongful raid.
“I feel very bad until now,” Galvez told Inquirer.
“I am really very sorry,” he said.
He said the main target of the raid was Mubin Kulin, alias Mulawin, a cousin of Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon, who was behind several kidnapping cases.
The military, said Galvez, got tips that nearly 100 Sulu-based Abu Sayyaf members were on Tapiantana Island.
But survivors said what the soldiers raided was not an Abu Sayyaf lair but a community of beneficiaries of the BDA.
Suddin, who was taken by the armed men along with Billamin, said the soldiers came aboard two gunboats and two speedboats.
Masked men
He counted at least 30 soldiers wearing “full-face masks.”
Some nine hours after the horror, Nurhidaya got a call asking her to pick up Billamin’s body outside an Army Special Forces camp in Isabela City. She was told four bullets hit Billamin.
Police in Basilan identified one Mobin Kulin, a “suspected Abu Sayyaf,” as a casualty in the March 8 raid. Kulin, police said, was a suspect in the 2000 Sipadan hostage crisis.
Later, Senior Supt. Nickson Muksan, Basilan police chief, would identify the dead as Billamin Hassan, but would tag him as an arson suspect.
Nurhidaya was inconsolable. “My husband was not Abu Sayyaf,” she said.
Her husband, Nurdihaya said, was not killed in a gunfight as authorities claimed.
“There was no firefight,” she said. Some of the soldiers, she added, “took the people’s savings of almost half a million pesos.”
She had filed a complaint at the Commission on Human Rights. —JULIE ALIPALA