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Are they painting the town yellow?
“On Wednesday, March 18, various groups called for President Noynoy Aquino’s ouster as they pelted the House of Representatives’ south gate with yellow paint to denounce the alleged ‘yellow-wash’ to shield the chief executive from his culpability on the Mamasapano operation,” reports RG Cruz on ABS-CBNnews.com.
The report noted: “The groups, including League of Filipino Students (LFS), Anakbayan, the National Union of Students of the Philippines, and Youth Act Now, also shook the gates as they criticized the alleged cover-up from Aquino’s allies in Congress.”
The report went on to explain that “the House has yet to resume its investigation into the Mamasapano incident even after the Senate and Philippine National Police-Board of Inquiry found the chief executive to have committed faults in the Mamasapano incident.”
The encounter in Mamasapano, Maguindanao on Jan 25 left 44 members of the elite Philippine National Police (PNP) Special Action Force (SAF) dead. The PNP-SAF troopers had been out to capture Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir alias “Marwan” and Filipino bomb maker Abdul Basit Usman. Both men had bounties on their heads placed by the U.S. government: US$5 million for Marwan and US$1 million for Usman.
The operation turned bloody when members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said they had to fight back because the PNP-SAF had breached their territory. They alleged that they had not been informed about the operation to get Marwan and Usman. The hostile encounter lasted 11 hours. The MILF lost 18 of their fighters.
Both the government and the MILF had done probes on the Mamasapano encounter to determine what went wrong, as the incident threatens the Bangsamoro peace deal. It has since been revealed that the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) and even some armed civilians were also involved in the clash.
Photo: Lovely Carbon, Secretary General of National Union of Students of the Philippines (Twitter)
