Manila, Dec 9 (DPA) Philippine police said Wednesday they have identified 161 suspects in last month’s politically motivated massacre of 57 people in a southern province, a police official said.
Chief Superintendent Raul Castaneda said many of those who participated in the gruesome Nov 23 mass killing in Ampatuan town in Maguindanao province, 930 km south of Manila, were government militiamen.
Castaneda said multiple murder charges were also being readied against militiamen who were allegedly led by Datu Andal Ampatuan Junior, scion of a powerful political clan closely allied with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Ampatuan Junior allegedly herded the victims, composed mostly of journalists and family members and supporters of a rival politician, to a remote hilltop village in Ampatuan town where they were executed.
Ampatuan Junior was arrested three days after the killings and charged with 25 counts of murder. Police were preparing to file additional courts of murder against him.
Arroyo declared a 60-day martial law in Maguindanao Dec 4. Soldiers have rounded up suspects including provincial Governor Andal Ampatuan Senior and four other sons in the case.
Zaldy Ampatuan, governor of the Muslim Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and brother of Ampatuan Junior, maintained his innocence Wednesday.
“My conscience is clear. I’m innocent,” he said from his detention cell in the southern city of General Santos. “It would not be just and fair if a wholesale condemnation is heaped on the entire clan.”
Leila De Lima, chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, said her agency would be investigating information the Ampatuans killed at least 200 more people in various areas in Maguindanao.
De Lima said that based on initial information from witnesses, the victims were buried in mass graves scattered across the province.
“Given the opportunity there will be witnesses who can exactly pinpoint these mass graves,” she said. “These are the victims of the same clan and the private armies.”
Police and military forces continued searching for weapons stashed by the Ampatuans in their hometown in Shariff Aguak and nearby areas.
On Tuesday night, government troops discovered a cache of ammunition at a warehouse owned by the Ampatuans in Shariff Aguak.
More than 1,000 firearms and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds have been recovered by soldiers and police since the start of the raids on Ampatuan homes.
