By Hader Glang
ZAMBOANGA CITY
At least six people were wounded when a homemade bomb exploded near City Hall in General Santos City in the southern Philippines late Tuesday.
Capt. Alberto Caber, regional military spokesman of Eastern Mindanao Command, said that an improvised explosive device went off at around 7:40 p.m. local time at the Jose Rizal monument, the victims immediately rushed to the nearby St. Elizabeth Hospital.
He did not give details of the victims' conditions but said a man with a shrapnel wound on his arm and a woman bruised in a fall have been treated and sent home."
The explosion damaged the monument's foundation," Caber added.
General Santos is a regional commercial hub, known as the center of the country's tuna industry, and is also the hometown of boxing icon Manny Pacquiao.
Authorities have yet to establish a motive or suspect in the incident, however in 2007 bomb attacks blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group hit General Santos and two other southern towns killing seven and wounded 44 other people.
The following year, a homemade bomb ripped through a tuna-canning factory that killed four and wounded 27 others.
Caber said members of the Joint Task Force Gensan of the Army's 10th Infantry Division and the local police were deployed to the blast site and cordoned it for an ongoing investigation.
The bombing occurred as authorities are keeping close watch on reports of that the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) militants have recruited members of a group named the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters in the Muslim south.
BIFF - through its spokesman Abu Misry Mama - on Monday confirmed that it had pledged allegiance to ISIL and was in constant communication with the group.
Mama said the group feared that the U.S. government’s pronouncement about neutralizing ISIL would affect Mindanao -- the second largest and southernmost major island in the Philippines -- and that its declaration of a “war on terror” against ISIL would launch proxy or direct hostilities in other countries outside the Middle East, including the Philippines.
BIFF opposes talks between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), who signed a March 27 peace deal that brought to a close 17 years of negotiations and ended a decades-old armed conflict in the southern area of Mindanao while granting Muslim areas greater political autonomy.
Since breaking away from the MILF in 2008, the BIFF has vowed to destroy the peace process with its head Ameril Umbra Kato leading attacks in Mindanao.
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