A grenade attack on a mosque in the troubled southern Philippines killed two people early Wednesday, authorities said, just days after a deadly Catholic cathedral bombing and a vote backing Muslim self-rule.<\/p>\n
\u201cA grenade was lobbed inside a mosque killing two persons and wounding another four,\u201d regional military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Gerry Besana of the attack in Zamboanga City.<\/p>\n
Philippine authorities initially said it was not a suicide attack, but on Tuesday President Rodrigo Duterte contradicted them saying one of the bombers had blown himself up outside the cathedral.<\/p>\n
The victims were sleeping inside the mosque at the time of the attack on the insurgency-plagued island of Mindanao, which is home to the Philippines\u2019 Muslim minority.
\nThe blast comes as the country was on high alert after a cathedral bombing that killed 21 people at Sunday mass on the remote, Muslim-majority island of Jolo.<\/p>\n
The attacks have interrupted the joy spurred by voters\u2019 decisive approval of giving Muslims in the south more control over their own affairs, which sparked hopes of quelling long-time separatist violence.<\/p>\n
Rebels and the government in Manila have expressed hope the new so-called Bangsamoro area will finally draw the investment needed to pull the region from the brutal poverty that makes it a hotspot for radical recruitment.<\/p>\n
However, hardline factions aligned with IS were not part of the decades-long peace process with the nation\u2019s largest separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, that culminated January 21 with the resounding approval of a new Muslim led-region in the south.<\/p>\n
Jolo, which is home to hardline Islamist factions, is the only area in the southern Philippines that voted against the Bangsamoro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A grenade attack on a mosque in the troubled southern Philippines killed two people early Wednesday, authorities said, just days after a deadly Catholic cathedral bombing and a vote backing Muslim self-rule. \u201cA grenade was lobbed inside a mosque killing two persons and wounding another four,\u201d regional military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Gerry Besana of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53772,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53770\/revisions\/53772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}