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John Unson - Philstar.com
June 5, 2026 | 6:50pm
Many of the evacuees from Barangay Malingao in Kadayawan, Cotabato are children, now in makershift evacuation sites far from their homes that gunmen shot with assault rifles on Thursday night, June 4, 2026.
Philstar.com / John Unson
COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Hundreds of villagers in Barangay Malingao in Kadayangan, Cotabato fled to safe areas after gunmen attacked them again on Thursday night, June 4, barely two days after the same group killed with assault rifles four individuals and wounded four others in the area.
Local executives and officials of the Army’s 602nd Infantry Brigade and its component-unit covering Kadayangan, the 33rd Infantry Battalion, told reporters early Friday that men armed with M16 combat rifles opened fire on Tuesday night at houses in Barangay Malingao and hurriedly fled, forcing more than 600 villagers, including elderly folks and school children, to abandon their homes, apprehensive of a repeat of the incident.
Officials of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region and local executives had confirmed that a villager was wounded in the atrocity, immediately brought by barangay responders to a hospital for treatment.
Police Capt. Steffie Salanguit, spokesperson of PRO-BAR, told reporters on Friday that local executives and traditional Moro datus in Kadayangan are helping investigators from their municipal police force identify the gunmen who shot at the houses in Barangay Malingao for prosecution.
Personnel of intelligence units under the Army’s 6th Infantry Division and PRO-BAR and the Cotabato Provincial Police Office said the gunmen who attacked Barangay Malingao on Thursday night could be the same culprits in the fatal shooting in the area on Tuesday morning of Musalik Talusan Balang, Haron Samad Boliongan, Romeo Endim Lombo and Abdul Haruddin Samad.
Balang, Boliongan, Lombo and Samad died from bullet wounds in different parts of their bodies.
The incident left four other Barangay Malingao residents wounded, all still confined to a hospital in nearby Midsayap town in Cotabato.
Kadayangan is one of the eight adjoining newly-created Bangsamoro towns that are grouped together in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area, under the regional government of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, but are inside Cotabato province in Administrative Region 12.
Text messages have been spreading around since Wednesday stating that the armed men who attacked Barangay Malingao on Tuesday morning and, subsequently, on Thursday night, are large-scale shabu and marijuana peddlers hostile to certain Kadayangan residents, reportedly competing with them in their trafficking of narcotics in the municipality.
Personnel of the Army and PRO-BAR units and Moro community elders in Kadayangan identified three of the gunmen involved in Tuesday’s attack in Barangay Malingao as the cousins Musib and Suwaib and their cohort, Norodin.
Salanguit and the commander of the 602nd Infantry Brigade, Army Brig. Gen. Ricky Bunayog, separately said all three of them and their accomplices in the brutal killing of Balang, Boliongan, Lombo and Samad are now the subject of a joint police-military manhunt.
