FIVE New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas were killed, while 11 others were wounded over the weekend after soldiers engaged the rebels in two gun battles in Negros Oriental.

A soldier was wounded in one of the firefights, said Maj. Gen. Emmanuel Bautista, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry “Spearhead” Division.

The first encounter occurred at about 6:45 a.m. on Saturday in the mountainous sitio Kulabyawan, barangay Banawe, Pamplona, Negros Oriental.

Bautista said a team from the 79th Infantry Battalion surprised about 15 rebels and engaged them in a close firefight which lasted for 40 minutes.

“My men crawled up to 15 meters away from the enemy before initiating the firefight. As a result, two rebels were killed while five others were wounded,” he said.

An enlistedman was wounded in the encounter. Bautista said the guerrillas were among rebels who provided security to Marilyn Badayos, secretary of the southeastern front of the NPA’s Central Visayas Regional Committee.

Badayos, of Cebu City, was arrested on Saturday by a joint team of soldiers and policemen at the Omars Pension House in Bacolod City.

The rebel leader was still recuperating from the wounds that she sustained from previous encounters with government troops when she was captured.

Bautista said about 13 hours after the first clash, another team of soldiers from the 79th IB engaged a group of rebels in the same sitio, killing three guerrillas and wounding six others.

The soldiers also recovered an M-16 rifle and rebel documents. Bautista said among those killed was a certain alias Bong, who was an NPA squad leader. Two of the wounded rebels were women, and they were identified with their aliases as Eva or Mina and Venus or Vangie.