Yt Framework

Unidentified gunmen attacked Saturday a group of Filipino troops working with civilians on a US-funded road project in the restive province of Basilan in the southern Philippines, officials said.

Officials said one civilian worker was injured in the strafing that occurred at around 6.45 a.m. in the town of Unkaya Pukan where Filipino troops are working on a 12-kilometer stretch in the village of Amaloy.

“The workers were harassed and one civilian was wounded in the attack in attack. There were no reports of Filipino military casualties,” Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang, a Philippine military spokesman, told the Mindanao Examiner.

He said US soldiers, who were accompanying an unidentified project engineer, arrived at the scene after the attack and evacuated the wounded civilian, Coneh Mohd, to a nearby hospital.

“No US soldiers were in the area during the attack. They arrived later and evacuated the wounded worker,” Cabangbang said.

Basilan military chief Col. Ricardo Visaya also said that Filipino troops engaged the attackers in a 20-minute gun battle. “The road construction project in the village of Amaloy was harassed by a still undetermined number of armed men. The gun battle lasted 20 minutes,” he said in a separate interview.

Some 600 US troops training Filipino soldiers in anti-terrorism are deployed in Mindanao region, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi provinces since 2001. They helped the Philippine military in defeating the homegrown al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group and members of the Jemaah Islamiya hiding in the troubled region.

Just early this month, a US drone helped tracked down a jungle base of the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiya in Sulu that resulted in a successful military air strike and killing as many as 15 terrorists, including Malaysian bomb expert Zulkifli bin Hir, also known as Marwan; and Indian militant Abdullah Ali, alias Muawiyah, and Abu Sayyaf leader Umbra Jumdail, whose nom de guerre was Dr. Abu.

Two Philippine Air Force planes bombed the hinterland village of Lanao Dakula in Parang town at around 2.30 a.m. on February 2 and destroying the hideout.

Zulkifli and Abdullah are included in the US wanted list and carried a $5 million and $50,000 bounty respectively, while Jumdail also had a $140,000 reward for his capture dead or alive.

The Abu Sayyaf has been coddling Jemaah Islamiya terrorists tagged as behind the spate of bombings in the southern Philippines. The group is still holding two Malaysian nationals, an Indian married to a Filipina and a Japanese treasure hunter, an Australian national and three Filipinos in the South.

By Mindanao Examiner With a report from Ely Dumaboc