The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is protesting what it deems an unfair report by NBI-NPS investigators who recommended the filing of criminal charges against Moro rebels involved in the January 25 Mamasapano incident.
According to MILF vice chairman Ghazali Jaafar, the act of theire members who shot at the police commandos on a mission to get Malaysian terrorist Marwan in Mamasapano, Maguindanao was purely a reaction to an attack made by the police. Thus, he stressed, such could not warrant the filing of charges of direct assault complexed with murder against the MILF rebels, as recommended by the government probers.
Jaafar repeated the MILF's assertion that it was the police Special Action Force (SAF) teams, deployed to Tukanalipao village to apprehend Marwan (real name Zulkifli bin Hir) and bomb maker Abdul Basit Usman, who shot at the MILF members first.
It remained unclear, however, exactly what steps the MILF will take if the charges are indeed pursued by the government.
On Wednesday, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima made public the report of the National Bureau of Investigation and National Prosecution Service tasked to investigate the outcome of the disastrous SAF mission, where 44 police commandos were killed, along with 18 MILF members and three civilians.
The report concluded that members of the 55th Special Action Force Company fired first at fighters of the MILF, triggering the battle that wiped out the elite police unit in the marshy area of Barangay Tukanalipao.
De Lima also said she has approved charges of direct assault complexed with murder and theft against 90 suspects -- members of the MILF, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and private armed groups -- in the deaths of 35 members of the 55th SAC, which served as the blocking force during the operation against Marwan.
Only one member of the 55th SAC -- Police Officer 2 Christopher Lalan -- survived.
The investigations into the deaths of nine members of the 84th SAC, or Seaborne, the unit that actually located and subsequently killed Marwan, as well as the killing of four sleeping MILF members, which Lalan is accused of, have yet to be finished for lack of witnesses, De Lima explained.
She has given the NBI-NPS team two more months to complete its probes into these incidents.
De Lima said the NBI-NPS report’s conclusions differ from that of the Senate investigation, which described the Mamasapano incident as a “massacre.”
“It was not a massacre as graphically described by the Senate, nor a simple mis-encounter as clinically suggested by the MILF,” she said. “Rather, the complicated truth is somewhat in between those two extremes.”
Although the report said it was the SAF that initiated hostilities in Tukanalipao, by 8 a.m., the MILF, BIFF and private armed group gunmen who engaged them in a “pintakasi” already knew they were fighting government forces.
It also said a number of the police commandos tried to surrender but were fired on until they could no longer fight back because they were either dead or severely wounded.
After the fighting eased, it added, MILF fighters finished off dying members of the SAF.
[Video report]
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/109340/video--milfs-jaafar-protests-doj-plan-to-file-criminal-raps-vs-saf-killers
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