ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

By JIM GOMEZ / AP WRITER | MANILA — Two crude bombs exploded minutes apart Thursday at a department store and a nearby clothing shop packed with Christmas shoppers in the southern Philippines, killing two people and wounding 48, officials said.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts in Iligan, a predominantly Christian city, but officials have blamed Muslim rebels for similar attacks in the volatile region in the past few months.

The homemade bombs were both placed at the baggage counters of the two stores, which are about 100 feet (30 meters) apart, said Iligan city police chief Virgilio Ranes.
Two workers were killed and 48 people wounded, including two in critical condition, hospital officials told The Associated Press.

Roger Alforque said his wife was handing some belongings to an attendant at the baggage counter of the Uni City department store in Iligan’s busy downtown area when an explosion rocked the counter.

“It sounded like a whistle bomb ... but it caused a lot of damage,” he told the AP by telephone from an Iligan hospital. The blast knocked his wife unconscious and wounded him and his 10-year-old daughter.

Ranes said police have been on alert for months in Iligan, about 485 miles (780 kilometers) southeast of Manila, due to threats from Muslim rebels.

Sporadic clashes between government troops and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an 11,000-strong rebel group fighting for self-rule in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation’s south, erupted in August after the country’s top court scrapped a preliminary accord on an expanded Muslim autonomous region.

More than 100 civilians and dozens of combatants have been killed.
Officials of Iligan, an industrial hub of more than 300,000 people, mostly Catholics, have strongly objected to a plan to annex a part of their city to the Muslim region.

The government has subsequently put peace talks on hold, although it recently indicated it was ready to restart negotiations.

Associated Press writers Hrvoje Hranjski and Oliver Teves contributed to this report.