Attackers hurled a grenade Monday in a southern Philippine city that has been targeted by Muslim rebels and criminal gangs, wounding a police officer and six other people, authorities said. The blast at a busy intersection in Cotabato city damaged a grocery and a nearby jewelry store, the city's police chief Willie Dangane said. No one has claimed responsibility. In a separate attack Monday, a roadside bomb exploded in Upi township in Maguindanao province, 60 km south of Cotabato, killing a government militiaman, said regional military spokesman Maj. Randolph Cabangbang. Separatist rebels are suspected in the attack, Cabangbang said. He also accused the rebels of firing at an army unit that responded to the bomb blast, wounding a captain and a soldier. The rebels did not comment immediately. Shortly after the Cotabato grenade blast, authorities detained one of the four suspects at a police checkpoint, said army spokesman Lt. Col. Arnulfo Marcelo Burgos Jr. Cabangbang indicated it was unlikely that the rebels were behind the Cotobato attack, saying they usually used bombs fashioned from unexploded mortar rounds rather than grenades. Cotabato, on the main southern island of Mindanao, is often hit by bombing attacks blamed on rebels and criminal gangs demanding extortion money from shop owners and transportation companies. A powerful bomb outside the Cotabato cathedral killed six people and wounded dozens July 5. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels, who have been fighting for Muslim self-rule in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation for decades, have denied military charges that they were responsible for the cathedral attack. Fighting between the rebels and government troops flared last August, when the government scrapped a preliminary autonomy deal, and three rebel commanders launched a deadly rampage in Christian communities. Government forces reacted with a major military offensive.
