“The reason why I knelt and kissed the ground, they were not able to call on Allah or make the sign of the cross before dying,” President Rodrigo Duterte thus explains his grand gesture on one of the sites where the twin suicide blasts happened on Aug. 24, 2020.
The bombing killed 15 people, including seven soldiers, and injured 75 others. The Armed Forces of the Philippines says the incident is deeply linked to the killing of four of their intelligence men by members of the Philippine National Police on June 29, 2020.
AFP Chief Gilbert Gapay yesterday, Sept. 2, 2020, said his men were minutes close to taking down the two female suicide bombers responsible for the Jolo blasts had the local police not entered the scene.
The strafing of the AFP’s intelligence officers raised suspicion that the policemen might be in cahoots with people in the Abu Sayyaf Group, stoked further by the possibility that the affinities might be too close in this very clannish communities. The PNP’s claim of a mistaken identity would have been palatable, but the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) found strong evidence that the firearms found near the AFP men were planted. That gesture alone reeks of foul intentions, even a sinister grand plot if one draws a line between that incident to the subsequent suicide bombing in Jolo.
Gapay said the four AFP men were on the brink of zeroing in on a few houses where the bomb plotters supposedly were, but the incident simply alarmed the latter and quickly flew out of sight.
“We were so close to neutralizing them,” Gapay told legislators. “The takedown team was already in the vicinity.”
Gapay said the AFP has a handful of theories about the incidents, but would rather wait for the results of the investigation now carried out by the NBI and the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, the President can internalize further his dramatic ground-kissing act by wielding all of his government’s faculties to get to the bottom of the incidents. Government wants to address terrorism in the country, as its zeal in pushing for the anti-terrorism law would show, it might as well start hauling the Jolo incident to the core—no stone left unturned.
That should be the most apt demonstration of government’s seriousness against terror, instead of going after opposition leaders like they are its nightmare bogey. Jolo is where the action is, and it is highly possible the perpetrators of terror have their men embedded in the very forces that are meant to fight it.
Otherwise, that kiss on the ground is just, well, a show.