Mamasapano massacre: Two years later

Today is the second year anniversary of the infamous Mamasapano massacre that shocked the entire nation when 44 elite Special Action Force troopers were brutally massacred and killed by elements of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front who were supposedly “friendly” to the Aquino Regime because while the so-called Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) was being crafted.

It was on that fateful Sunday of January 25, 2015 when the massacre took place in Tukanalipao, Mamasapano, Maguindanao. Forty-four SAF members (purportedly with a few US Army embedded advisers) were ambushed and brutally massacred in one of our history’s worst acts of terrorism against our police or military forces. What made matters worse was the fact that the killers of the SAF took video and photos of how they killed our troopers with guns and machetes and uploaded these on Facebook.

This was a horrifying act of barbarism, unprecedented in the annals of our history, and what gets my gall is that two years later, not a single one of those killers have been brought to jail! Because more often than not, the media moves on to the next big breaking news, this incident is no longer seen in our headlines. The Mamasapano massacre is fast becoming another Maguindanao massacre where justice is purposely delayed and denied!

For a year, the Aquino Regime refused to have any “independent” inquiries as to why Operation Exodus failed miserably. It was supposedly designed to capture or arrest Malaysian terrorist and bomb maker Zulkifi Abdir a.k.a. Marwan and his companion Basit Usman (the latter was able to escape) but what everyone knows is that Oplan Exodus was nothing but a “bounty hunting” operation because of the huge price on the head of Marwan at US$5 million dollars. Was this the reason why no less than then President Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III was on top of the situation in a drone center in Zamboanga City on that fateful day?

While it’s been exactly two years ago, we are now six months into the presidency of President Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte and we would have expected him to come up with a fact-finding committee to get into the bottom of why Oplan Exodus was a total failure. Unfortunately, President Duterte clearly pointed out that that he did not want to revive any discussion on the Mamasapano incident, but he had a disturbing question as to why no one called up the air assets of the Armed Forces of the Philippines like helicopters stationed in Mindanao when the fighting was raging and could have tipped the balance. Surely this question from President Duterte can only be answered with a full-blown investigation.

I, too, have some questions to ask that remain unanswered today. First question is why was the nipa hut where Marwan was allegedly killed burned to the ground a week after the massacre in what many pundits say was a clear case of destroying any evidence? What we would like to know is, did the PNP SOCO team take pictures of the dead Marwan inside his hut or did they take photos of the bullet holes in order to ascertain the bullet’s trajectory? Well, all this evidence went out in smoke, which makes us conclude that there was an effort to hide something in Mamasapano.

What about the presence of that US white colored helicopter that helped evacuate casualties? We saw photos of that helicopter on Facebook, adding to the rumors that US soldiers were involved in that ill-fated mission, which the US Embassy vehemently denied. But farmers in Mamasapano insisted that four Caucasian-looking soldiers were among the casualties of that encounter in Mamasapano. In my book, the Duterte administration should call for a thorough investigation on this incident so that the Filipino people would know the real score as to who benefited from that operation and why it failed miserably. If we do not investigate this, then those rumors would never stop spreading and justice for the 44 fallen SAF will never be served!