Murdered Teduray chieftain Lencio Arig (photo courtesy of Mindanao Peoples' Peace Movement)
A leader of the Teduray tribe in Maguindanao province was killed in an ambush Thursday afternoon, an indigenous peoples advocacy group said.
The Mindanao Peoples' Peace Movement said Timuay (chieftain) Lencio Arig was with his wife and small daughter when attacked in Barangay Romongaub, South Upi town. The two were unhurt.
The group could give no further details of the incident as of this posting.
Timuay Labi (supreme chieftain) Sammie Bello, who heads the Timuay Justice and Governance, the indigenous political structure of the Teduray and Lambangian tribes of Maguindanao, of which Arig was a member, also said they had yet to receive a fuller account of the incident.
Interviewed by phone, Bello said the initial information he had received indicated that Arig was "riddled with bullets" when the killers "emptied a whole M16 magazine on him."
He said the reports relayed to him indicated that Arig and his wife and child were walking from his farm in Romongaub to the highway when they were waylaid "between 2 to 3 p.m." by the gunmen, who had masked their faces with bonnets and hidden themselves in a rubber plantation.
Bello described the murdered tribal leader as someone who "always went out of his way to avoid conflict."
The 100,000-strong Teduray Lambangian, along with the Dulangan Manobo, lay claim to an ancestral domain that spans 300,000 hectares of land and coastal waters within 12 municipalities of Maguindanao and parts of neighboring Sultan Kudarat province.
They have been campaigning for official recognition of their ancestral lands and indigenous culture within the prospective Bangsamoro homeland that is expected to be created once the Bangsamoro Basic Law is enacted.
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/96566/maguindanao-lumad-leader-killed-in-ambush
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