Communist rebels raid police station in Philippine's south
Philippines, Jul 01, 2009
In the northern Philippine province of Quezon, government troops clashed with New People's Army (NPA) communist rebels on Wednesday morning (July 1). Government troops, consisting of soldiers from the Philippine Army's 76th Infantry Battalion and police operatives, collided with an undetermined amount of NPA rebels in Cawayan village, Lopez town early in the morning, Senior Superintendent Elmo Francis Sarona, the officer-in-charge of the Quezon provincial police, told the Inquirer.net. However, according to the Inquirer.net, no casualties have been reported. Sarona noted that troops were pursuing the rebels. On Wednesday, news of an NPA rebel attack also surfaced in the landlocked province of Agusan del Sur on the southern island of Mindanao. The Inquirer.net reported a police official as saying that some 50 NPA rebels raided a police station of Sta. Josefa town that morning. According to Senior Superintendent Nestor Fajurra, spokesperson of the regional police in Caraga, the rebels showed up at the police station at around 9:00 AM, when five policemen were manning the station, which is housed in the town's government center. Fajurra told the Inquirer.net that policemen decided against clashing with the rebels to prevent civilians from being caught in the crossfire. "It was a swift rebel operation. No shots fired because our men decided not to (fight back) in order to keep out of harm's way the civilians who were transacting in the center at the time," Fajurra was quoted as saying by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. During the raid, rebels took three M-16 rifles, an M-14 rifle and a 9 mm pistol. As the second raid on the police station this year, Fajurra attributed the act as "NPA's tactic to divert attention from the ensuing military operations in nearby towns and in Compostela Valley province." The previous raid occurred in January when rebels barged into the provinces' police station of Carmen town. Meanwhile, in the northern Mindanao region, a ranking leader of the NPA was apprehended on Wednesday during a combat operation in Misamis Occidental province, the Inquirer.net reported the military as saying. Dennis Paradero, also known as Dondon and Demz, was nabbed in the village of Villaba in Tangub City and was found carrying explosives, a laptop computer, five mobile phones and a PDA phone. The NPA has been fighting for 40 years to institute a communist government in the Philippines, making it one of Asia's longest running insurgencies. The military has vowed to crush the weakening rebellion by the time the current president leaves office next year. The rebels are active in about 69 of the Philippines' 81 provinces, but their numbers have dwindled to below 5,000 in recent months, far from their peak of 25,000 in the 1980s, according to the AP. The NPA had been negotiating peace with the government before withdrawing from talks in 2004, accusing the Philippine government of supporting the NPA's inclusion on US and European lists of terrorist organizations.
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