October 16, 2024 | 9:45pm
COTABATO CITY — Investigators remain uncertain about the bombing of the Bangsamoro health minister’s office and the automatic rifle attack on the home of a regional human rights commissioner, which resulted in the death of his aide. Both incidents occurred within just two days.
Bangsamoro Health Minister Kadil Monera Sinolinding Jr. has announced a P200,000 reward for information that could assist police in solving the incident in which a motorist detonated a fragmentation grenade at the entrance to his clinic and office in the Zenaida Subdivision of Cotabato City shortly before midnight on October 12.
Sinolinding, a concurrent member of the 80-seat Bangsamoro regional parliament, has a separate office as health minister, located inside the 32-hectare regional capitol in Cotabato City, less than a kilometer away.
Sinolinding, a physician-ophthalmologist, has no known enemies and is popular for his having treated for free, thousands of poor cataract and pterygium patients since his “doctor to the barrio” days in the 1990s in the then-undivided Maguindanao province that got split in early 2022 into what are now Maguindanao del Norte and Maguindanao del Sur.
Employees of the Ministry of Health-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao hinted that Sinolinding also had possibly caught the ire of corrupt and non-performing MoH-BARMM officials affected by the extensive reform programs he has been pushing forward since BARMM Chief Minister Ahod Balawag Ebrahim designated him as health minister in early May this year.
His subordinates in his parliament office had shared with reporters and police investigators closed-circuit security camera recordings showing a motorist tossing a fragmentation grenade at the ground of his office and clinic compound and speeding away just as an explosion ripped through the area.
No one was hurt in the bombing but the blast that reverberated through the scene caused panic among villagers in houses around.
Last October 10, or two days before the grenade incident, gunmen shot with combat rifles the house of Commissioner Archie Buaya of the Bangsamoro Human Rights Commission, an ethnic Teduray, in the upland Barangay Labungan in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte.
The attack resulted in the death of Buaya’s security aide, John Debang, also a Teduray tribesman.
Sinolinding and Buaya are both widely perceived as potential strong endorsers of candidates whom they are to support during the 2025 electoral exercise.
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