Bombs near Brgy. Salman

Folk, kin mark massacre
AUTHORITIES found and detonated three explosives near the site of the infamous Maguindanao massacre as relatives commemorated the second year of the incident yesterday, police and military officials said.
Director Felicisimo Khu, head of the National Police Directorate for Integrated Police Operations in Western Mindanao, said an improvised explosive made of an 81-mm mortar round was found by Army troops around 5:30 a.m. along the National Road, near the massacre site in Sitio Masalay, Barangay Salman, Ampatuan town.
Around 6:35 a.m., another IED made of a 105-mm Howitzer ammunition was also found along the road, near Camp Imam Malang of the Moro National Liberation Front.
"The explosion near the Phoenix Gas Station in Poblacion, Ampatuan, was not a separate incident but was actually the disruption of the 81mm IED," Khu clarified.
The IEDs, which are "signature bombs" of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front "lost command," are meant to disrupt the commemoration activities, Col. Leopoldo Galon, Armed Forces Eastern Mindanao Command spokesman, said.
Meanwhile, Maguindanao police director Senior Supt. Marcelo Pintac said commemoration activities at the massacre site, attended by Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo and other VIPs, ended around 11:30 a.m., without any untoward incident. 
Another explosive, which was first reported as an IED, was found at the Public Market in Buluan town around 12 noon.  It turned out to be a grenade.
About 200 policemen were deployed to secure the massacre site and the immediate vicinity with dozens of people attending the commemoration ceremonies.
Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu, whose relatives were among the dead, canceled a visit to the massacre site in Ampatuan, saying, “We’re taking no chance.”
“I was about to go there but the provincial director advised me to refrain from going to the site,” Mangudadatu said. He survived an August bomb attack that killed two persons, where shooting incidents and bomb explosions are common.
It wasn’t clear who was responsible for planting the explosives, but about 100 of the 197 people charged in the politically motivated 2009 killings are still at large.
Andal Ampatuan Sr., patriarch of a powerful Maguindanao clan and former governor of an autonomous Muslim region, is among nearly 100 suspects being tried on murder charges in the massacre, together with his sons and other relatives.
Gunmen allegedly led by former town mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. stopped members of the Mangudadatu clan, the Ampatuans’ political rivals, as they traveled to file for candidacy in regional elections. They were led to a hilltop clearing, gunned down and hastily buried in mass graves. The dead included 32 media workers covering the Mangudadatu, making the massacre the worst single killing of journalists in the world.
Relatives and colleagues of the slain journalists visited the massacre site Tuesday to offer prayers and 58 white lilies and lit candles. The charge sheet lists 57 victims but the body of journalist Reynaldo Momay, who was also part of the convoy, was never found.
Father Robert Reyes celebrated Mass at the mound where concrete markers bearing the names of dead were erected.—John Roson, 
Inquirer, AP (Mindanao Edition)