MANILA (UCAN): Church and rights groups in the Philippines have condemned the killing of three indigenous people, one of them a 12-year-old girl, during a military operation in the southern Mindanao region.
The victims, members of the Lumad-Manobo tribe, were allegedly shot dead by soldiers conducting an operation on June 15 to arrest suspected communist rebels in Surigao del Sur province.
The military claimed the three were armed and opened fire on the soldiers before being shot dead.
Human rights group Karapatan, however, said the three were innocent farmers and the victims of a “massacre.”
In a June 16 statement, the secretary-general of Karapatan, Cristina Palabay, said, “We condemn in the strongest terms this latest massacre … how many more will Duterte’s state forces kill and kill? This is the 25th massacre under Duterte’s counterinsurgency campaign, with victims killed en masse and with no mercy.”
We condemn in the strongest terms this latest massacre…
The group claimed its own investigation revealed that soldiers fired on a group of six farmers while they were harvesting crops on their farm.
Three were killed while the others ran for safety.
“The perpetrators are mad killers with clearly no respect for life and rights. They look upon the Lumad (indigenous) people as hunted prey, lie through their teeth and falsely label victims as members of the New People’s Army,” Palabay added. The New People’s Army is the armed wing of the Philippines’ Communist Party
According to Karapatan, 121 people have now died in the 25 massacres it says have been committed by soldiers during the Duterte administration. All of the victims were tagged as terrorists, the group said.
“These killings should be met with the strongest condemnation possible,” Palabay said.
