Updated on
Summary
At least 9 people were killed Thursday when a bomb blew up on a bus in the southern Philippines, police said. The incident occurred Thursday morning on the Kabacan-Matalam national highway in the town of Matalam in North Cotabato, on the island of Mindanao -- in the largely Muslim south. The state-run Philippines News Agency reported 30 injuries, and Gil Meneses, the regional police director, told CNN that nine of them were serious. Three unidentified men boarded the bus along the highway in Kabacan and left in Matalam, authorities said. Minutes later, an improvised explosive device, that the police say was fashioned from a mortar cartridge and triggered by a mobile phone, detonated. The bus conductor was among those instantly killed, Meneses said. The province of North Cotabato is just to the east of Maguindanao, the site of some of the worst politically motivated violence in recent Philippine history. Philippines President Benigno Aquino III ordered police Thursday to arrest the perpetrators of the bus explosion in the province of North Cotabato in southern Philippines. The President told reporters that one of the angles that the investigators are looking at is extortion. Aquino expressed sympathy with the families of those who perished in the bus explosion.
