COTABATO CITY (JFU, Oct. 16, 2024) — Probers are still trying to put closures to the bombing in the premises of the office of the Bangsamoro health minister and the strafing with combat rifles of the house of a regional human rights commissioner in a span of just two days.
Bangsamoro Health Minister Kadil Monera Sinolinding, Jr. has offered a P200,000 earnest incentive for information that could help the police solve the setting off, at almost midnight last October 12, by a motorist of a fragmentation grenade at the entrance path to his clinic and parliament office in Barangay Rosary Heights 8 in Cotabato City.
Sinolinding, who is also a concurrent member of the 80-seat Bangsamoro regional parliament, has a separate office as a 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.
While Sinolinding is not a politician, he can handily swing thousands of votes in favor of candidates of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party in next year’s electoral exercise. The party is led by Bangsamoro Chief Minister Ahod Balawag Ebrahim, who is, for Sinolinding, a revered elder since the 1990s.
Employees of the Ministry of Health-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao said Sinolinding may also have possibly caught the ire of corrupt and non-performing MoH-BARMM officials affected by reform programs he has been pushing forward since Ebrahim designated him as health minister last May this year.
His subordinates in his parliament office had shared to 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 sped away just as an explosion ripped through the area.
Residents in houses around said two men together in another motorcycle acted as lookouts when their motorcycle-riding accomplice perpetrated the grenade attack and turned around and motored away after the blast.
Last October 10, gunmen armed with M16 assault rifles opened fire at the house of Commissioner Archie Buaya of the Bangsamoro Human Rights Commission, who is an ethnic Teduray, in the upland Barangay Labungan in Maguindanao del Norte. The attack left a Teduray watchman, John Debang Badly wounded.
Like Sinolinding, Buaya is not a politician, but wields influence over voters in Teduray ancestral domains in the Bangsamoro region.
Photo shows the premises of the parliament office and clinic of Sinolinding, Jr. where a bomber detonated a fragmentation grenade nighttime last weekend, October 12, 2024. The encircled spot on the ground is where the grenade landed and went off. (JFU, IN COTABATO CITY, OCT. 16, 2024)
