Red rebels kill nine in Visayas ambush

From the Gulf Today (Sep 13): Red rebels kill nine in Visayas ambush

Heavily armed members of the communist New People’s Army (NPA) ambushed a truckload of people returning home after attending a “barangay” (village) dance in Negros Occidental province in the Visayas in Central Philippines, killing at least nine people including a policeman and a woman, police confirmed on Wednesday.

Superintendent Celestino Guerra, the provincial police chief, said the rebels fired from their ambush position in a sugarcane field as the truck wended its way towards a village in the town of La Castillana, Negros Occidental at dawn on Sunday.
Based on the testimonies of survivors, Guerra said about 20 heavily armed insurgents raked the victims’ truck with automatic rifle fire at the foothills of Mount Kanlaon, firing at least 300 rounds of ammunition.

“Two of our wounded policemen managed to return fire but there were just too many gunmen firing away and were forced to retreat,” Guerra said on the latest deadly attack by the NPAs since President Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte formally ended their formal peace talks with the government.

He also cited the testimony of one of the survivors who told the police that he overheard the insurgents yelling in Filipino, “Mabuhay ang NPA” (Long live the NPA) as they withdrew towards Mount Kanlaon, one of the country’s most active volcanoes.

Colonel Francisco Patrimonio, an Army infantry brigade commander, confirmed that the ambush was perpetrated by the NPA, the armed component of the Communist Party of the Philippines that has been waging a Maoist-style insurgency against the government for 50 years, considered the longest in the region.

Duterte formally ended the negotiations early this year due to the unabated attacks by the NPAs on business establishments as well as police and military outposts while their representatives were peace with the government in Oslo, Norway as the third party facilitator.

Duterte also accused the Maoists of engaging in massive extortion activities under the guise of demanding payment of “revolutionary taxes” from business firms especially mining and bus companies.

Meanwhile, police reported that 14 senior citizens were killed when the overloaded minibus they were riding lost its brakes and plunged into a 200-metre ravine in the the town of Balolan in Kalinga province in the Northern Luzon highlands.

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