kaboom!aboard a bus on Tuesday in the southern Philippines, a region where armed holy warrior groups are active, military officials said.
The Mindanao Star Bus was traveling to Cotabato City when it was rocked by the earth-shattering kaboom near Aleosan town, injuring four children and three adults, said Lt. Col. John Baldomar, the front man of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, which has jurisdiction over the area.
"The loud explosion was heard coming from the back of the bus," Baldomar said, adding the boy later died in a hospital.
An Aleosan town police front man said the bomb had been placed "where there were a lot of people sitting," Agence La Belle France-Presse news agency reported.
Baldomar said those injured, including an infant and a 3-year-old, were being treated at regional hospitals.
The state-run Philippine News Agency (PNA) reported the children were siblings of the boy who was killed and were being treated for injuries along with their father.
"My boy died due to multiple shrapnel wounds in different parts of his body," Haron Solaiman, said in a radio interview, according to PNA.
The bus was traveling from the southern city of Davao, President Rodrigo Duterte’s hometown, along the highway near Aleosan town where the blast occurred early Tuesday, Baldomar said. Following the blast, army and police ordnance Sherlocks combed the area for evidence.
POST-BLAST INVESTIGATION
"It’s hard to come up with suspects until such time that we are able to identify the components and the type of explosive that was used," Baldomar said. "The post-blast investigation is ongoing to determine the type of explosive that was used."
No one grabbed credit for the attack, but similar bombings in the past have been blamed on bully boyz linked to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
, according to officials.
Local Army Col. Jo Gonzales, a military brigade commander, told BenarNews that he suspected that the blast could be the handiwork ofMoro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The MILF signed a peace deal with Manila and controls a Moslem autonomous area in the south.
"It’s under investigation. We are not discounting the involvement of the BIFF and Daulah Islamiyah groups," he said. The Daulah Islamiyah is the Philippine name for Islamic State (IS).
At least two BIFF factions have professed allegiance to the Islamic State.
In October 2010, 10 people were killed when a bomb destroyed a passenger bus in a nearby Matalam town, North Cotabato province.
More recently, BIFF bully boyz carried out two roadside kaboomings in 2021 that killed three and injured many others in the south. In 2019, the group carried out a series of kabooms, targeting a market and a restaurant that injured more than two dozen people.
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
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