Bangsamoro Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua said on Wednesday he would look into the beheading of another Teduray leader in Datu Hoffer town of Maguindanao del Sur Tuesday night.
‘I will talk to the security sector first because I still don’t have the accurate information, but BARMM will (investigate) because we don’t want this thing to happen to our IP brothers,’ Macacua said when asked along the sidelines of the Mindanao Development Forum about the latest killing of non-Moro IPs in BARMM.
Nel Lupos, 60, a former village councilor of Barangay Mantao and a resident of Limpongo village, Datu Hoffer town of Maguindanao del Sur, was killed at around 6 p.m. on Tuesday, said Timuay Leticio Datuwata, head of the Timuay Justice and Governance, the indigenous political structure of the Teduray-Lambangian tribe.
‘He was alone inside his nipa hut in his farmland when several armed men forcibly entered and brutally killed him by beheading him,’ Datuwata said.
Lupos was the 102nd non-Moro IP leader killed in BARMM because of issues related to their ancestral land, according to Datuwata.
The brutal killing came after the government failed to arrest the perpetrators of the previous killings, including that of Baywan Angan, whose wife personally knew the identity of the killers but was also killed days after her husband’s murder.
Datuwata said that Angan’s killers, who already had pending warrants of arrest, were still allowed to roam free.
The killings also continued to happen despite the increased deployment of security personnel in the area after Teduray leaders presented their case before a series of hearings conducted by the congressional committee on indigenous peoples early this year, Datuwata added.
According to Datuwata, Lupos left his house in Mantao village and settled in Limpongo following the killing of Angan, also a village councilor, in Sitio Kukor on December 7 last year.
Lupos was the second non-Moro IP leader who became a victim of beheading in Maguindanao del Sur this year.
In February this year, the decomposing body of Fernando Promboy, 65, an elder of the Teduray-Lambangian tribe, was found beheaded days after he was reported missing in Datu Hoffer town.
Promboy and his family were forced to leave their home and settle in Datu Hofer’s Limpongo village in December 2024, also after the killing of Angan.
On April 29, 2023, or almost two years before Promboy was killed, Promboy’s cousin, Juanito, the IP mandatory representative in the Tuayan Mother barangay council, was killed, also due to a land dispute.
‘This unending violence targets tribesmen who refuse to give up their ancestral lands. When you resist, they kill you,’ Datuwata said, adding the same group of gunmen involved in previous attacks could be responsible.
Datuwata said he would no longer issue formal condemnations because of the government’s failure to do something to stop the attacks.
‘The more I speak out, the worse the killings become,’ he said. ‘We’re tired of this cycle of violence against us, but still, there’s no direct action from the government,’ he said.