Philippine authorities fatally shoot 10 insurgents during violent confrontation while attempting to take them into custody

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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AFP

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