Philippines forces kill 10 militants in arrest gunfight

Philippine security forces killed 10 alleged armed Islamist militants on Friday who resisted an attempt to arrest them, police said.

The firefight with police and soldiers happened in the Muslim-populated south of the mainly Catholic Asian nation, where remnants of Islamic State-inspired groups operate.

Among the dead was Amerol Mangoranca, leader of an armed group called the Maute-Dawlah Islamiya, a regional police report said.

The government force arrived near the town of Marantao before dawn to serve arrest warrants for murder, homicide, and kidnapping against Mangoranca and his group, it said.

This triggered an hour-long firefight with the group, which included the rebel leader’s wife and three other women.

A separate military report said an unharmed infant was recovered after the gunfight.

Government forces sustained no casualties and recovered guns and explosives, the military added.

The group is suspected of being behind a January attack that killed four soldiers and wounded another, said the Philippine Army’s First Infantry Division report.

The slain gunmen were from the “same network responsible for the Marawi siege and years of violence”, the military unit’s commander, Major-General Yegor Barroquillo, said in the statement.

In May 2017, hundreds of Filipino Muslim fighters, as well as foreign militants, joined forces to take over the Mindanao city of Marawi, intending to make it the capital of a Southeast Asian caliphate to be ruled by their radical interpretation of Islam.

A bloody siege by government forces ended five months later with the loss of more than a thousand lives and with many of the militant groups’ most senior leaders being killed.

AFP