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22 die in prison shooting
15/03/2005 21:15 - (SA)
Manila - Even from behind bars, the Abu Sayyaf gave President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo yet another crisis - a 29-hour prison uprising, live on national television.
When a deal to end the stand-off broke down over extra demands from Muslim militants who already had killed three guards in a botched break-out, Arroyo held a dawn meeting on Tuesday of her 11-person crisis committee and decided to get tough.
First came a 15-minute deadline for surrender. After it expired with no sign of movement from the detention facility for terror suspects and others charged with major crimes, elite police swarmed in, guns blazing amid clouds of tear gas, in an all-out assault that left 22 inmates dead, including a trio of Abu Sayyaf leaders and the spokesperson for the rebelling inmates.
Officials said police found eight handguns and two unexploded grenades in the jail. The lone police fatality was discovered under a pile of debris hours after the operation ended.
Arroyo's spokesperson, Ignacio Bunye, had little sympathy, saying: "The terrorists got what was coming to them."
"Throughout the day, the nation had to listen to the demands of people who had just killed three jail guards and were on trial for multiple murder and kidnapping," The Philippine Star daily wrote in an editorial. "And we wonder why the country is turning into a terrorist paradise."
But in the restive south, where insurgencies for Muslim self-rule have been raging for the last three decades, the prison assault was bound to be seen as heavy-handed.
'Tried to resolve it peacefully'
Security forces braced for possible attacks, recalling a trio of bombs that went off within an hour in three cities a month ago, killing eight people and wounding 100, in what the Abu Sayyaf called retaliation for a major military offensive against their compatriots that ousted them from a training base. The inmates had warned of bombings if there was an assault on the jail.
"We hope there's going to be no retaliatory strikes from our Muslim brothers because they know what happened here," national police chief Arturo Lomibao said. "We tried to resolve it peacefully. There's no such thing as persecution or that we are singling them out."
An Abu Sayyaf leader still at large, Abu Sulaiman, warned the public that the militants would bring war "right into your doorstep".
The crisis began on Monday morning with Abu Sayyaf suspects stabbing guards and snatching their guns. Police and prosecutors said they had been warning the jail since December of break-out plans by an least one of a trio of top Abu Sayyaf leaders detained there. Interior Secretary Reyes named three Abu Sayyaf leaders among the detainees killed: Alhamzer Manatad Limbong, known as Kosovo; Ghalib Andang, known as Commander Robot; and Nadzmie Sabtulah, alias Commander Global.
- AP
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