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DAVAO
CITY—There was no ominous sign, nothing unusual as Rusty
Antelino, 31, left his house in Kidapawan City, North
Cotabato, for work as a bus conductor of Weena Express
1104 that Friday afternoon.
He had
been doing that for the past 10 months, when he was
hired by the company, the major interprovincial bus
company plying the Davao City-Cotabato City route.
Antelino
was his usual self, cracking jokes and teasing his
children until they laughed. His wife and cousins,
including Noraima Guiamad, went to this city earlier in
the day to see the sights.
At 5:40
p.m. Friday, Antelino was among the severely injured
when a homemade bomb in an old bag, placed just outside
the door of the bus, exploded when he and a soldier
threw it at the prodding of other passengers.
At 6:30
p.m., Guiamad, other cousins and Antelino’s wife
received the text message on her cellular phone that “a
Weena Bus was bombed in Bansalan.”
A night
earlier, Erwin Sisneros, 31, dreamed he was cuddled and
carried by a neighbor, just like a mother would with her
baby, making him the butt of jokes by neighbors who told
him that he was “being haunted by the neighbor [in his
dream] for being unable to visit his wake.” The neighbor
was to be buried on Saturday.
“He [Sisneros]
told us about his dream and we teased him into visiting
our kumpare,” said Estrellita Sisneros, Erwin’s
sister-in-law. “He did not eat his lunch that day,
apparently bothered.”
Erwin
was driving his tricycle on the ViaCrucis national
highway when he met the Weena bus going in the opposite
direction. An explosion shortly sent shrapnel whizzing
by, making a clean, small, piercing cut through his
neck. He was bloodied, and asked his brother, also a
tricycle driver, to take him to the hospital.
Sisneros,
along with Antelino and other victims, were all rushed
to the Davao del Sur Provincial Hospital in Digos. The
victims who were seriously injured were later taken to
other hospitals in the region for better medical care.
At the
Davao Medical Center (DMC) here, Antelino’s wife and his
cousins rushed to the DMC to determine if Antelino would
be one of those who would be transferred later from the
provincial hospital.
“We were
late. He was one of those taken here in an ambulance but
he was [already] dead,” Guiamad said.
A crew
member of a national television network said that
Antelino was one of those who was transferred to a
tricycle after the ambulance suffered a busted tire
several hundred meters away from the DMC. He was
declared dead on arrival at the emergency room.
Antelino
apparently was one of those who absorbed the impact of
the blast. Driver Romeo Lu died on the spot.
A
soldier, identified as Cpl. Daryl Potestas, also died on
the spot. He was the one who helped throw the bag
outside the bus.
“We
have been prodding the driver and the conductor to throw
the bag away because the owner of that bag has not
returned,” one of the passengers told investigators
after the incident, saying that the passengers at the
front of the bus were scared that the bag may have a
bomb inside.
“The
blast was so powerful that it lifted me and threw me
away,” Kagawad Eldy Ambat, 45, told hospital attendants
at the DMC, where he was also transferred. He sustained
wounds in both of his legs, on his body and one near his
left eye.
Rey
Mendez, a worker at the Apo Hardware, where the bus was
when the bomb exploded, was closing the shop when it
happened. He sustained several injuries in the body and
DMC personnel had to drain some blood off him to avoid
infection.
Adelaida
Badilla, social welfare and action officer of the
Municipal Disaster Coordinating Council of Santa Cruz,
said that two other persons, who were still
unidentified, were also killed.
Maj.
Randolph Cabangbang, spokesman of the military’s Eastern
Mindanao Command (EastMinCom) earlier said there were
eight fatalities, but only six were identified.
The
EastMinCom chief, Lt. Gen. Rodolfo Obaniana, told
dxRP-Radyo ng Bayan that initial tests confirmed traces
of trinitrotoluene (TNT), the active substance of
explosives, in the scene of the explosion.
“Investigators still have to validate the collected
pieces of evidence [although] the signature of [the
bomb] is similar to the one that exploded in Matalam [in
October last year],” he said. “That’s why, it is most
likely that it is the same group that did it.”
The bomb
was also rigged with pieces of cast iron and was
triggered by a cellular phone. “Maybe the group bought
the materials [in the Matalam bombing and in the
Bansalan bombing] from the same source.”
Although
the bombings in Matalam,
General
Santos City and Cotabato City were blamed on terrorists,
Obaniana said that extortion was “the most logical
angle.” He did not elaborate, although the bus company
had been receiving extortion letters during the more
than ten years that its buses have been the targets of
bombings.
In
Friday’s explosion, an almost simultaneous bombing was
made in another Weena bus in Cotabato City. No
casualties were reported.
--With R. M. Maitem |
