MANILA, Philippines — Nine militants from a group that helped the Philippine army hunt down Islamic State-linked fighters in the country’s south have been killed in a firefight with police, their colleagues said Monday.
The victims, members of a military wing of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, were rounded up Friday by government agents taking part in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
The men had identified themselves as Moro Islamic Liberation Front fighters but were still stripped of their firearms and killed, according to a complaint that the group filed to a committee monitoring a ceasefire between the group and the government.
After the men were disarmed, “they were deliberately shot by the operatives, which resulted [in] their instant death,” the group’s complaint read, adding that at least three others, including a woman, were also wounded.
The municipal police commander, Chief Inspector Sunny Leoncito, said the government forces had been seeking to arrest two men in a drug case, both of whom were believed to have been killed in the raid. But what was to have been a routine anti-drug operation turned into an hourlong gunbattle on the outskirts of the town of Matalam.
The militants who survived later surrendered and gave up their firearms, including two sniper rifles, several assault rifles and handguns, as well as a rocket-propelled grenade. However, the government operatives did not find drugs on the fighters.
A Moro Islamic Liberation Front spokesman, Vol Al-Haq, said the group would file a “strong protest” with the government over the killings. He said he believed that a brief firefight occurred before the fighters identified themselves, and that they might have believed they were being attacked by another armed group.
“After they surrendered, they were massacred,” the spokesman said, adding that the group was demanding an impartial investigation jointly carried out with a third party or a nongovernmental organization.