Ampatuan Sr. recuperating at Army brigade camp in Davao City

DAVAO CITY – The Ampatuan patriarch, Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr., has been moved secretly on Sunday night, December 6, to his new refuge at the headquarters here of the Army's 10th Infantry Division.

Maj. Gen. Carlos Holganza, 10th ID commander confirmed to BusinessMirror that the elder Ampatuan has been moved to their headquarters in Camp Panacan, about 18 kilometers northeast of downtown Davao City, after he was treated of his hypertension at the Davao Doctors' Hospital here since early Saturday morning.

“We are just using the camp as temporary facility for his custody, [but] he is under the custody of the CIDG [Criminal Investigation and Detection Group],” Holganza said in his text message on December 7.

News photographers have been keeping a vigil outside the hospital on Sunday night to get snapshots of the Ampatuan patriarch when he would be moved to the military camp. But photographers said they were tricked into believing that he was the man wrapped in blanket and hedged in by a phalanx of soldiers from the military's anti-terror unit, Task Force Davao.

“We were made to believe that he was. Ampatuan may have been sneaked outside at the other exits of the hospital simultaneous with that decoy,” Edgar Arro, photographer for the Davao newspaper, Mindanao Times, told BusinessMirror.

Ampatuan was airlifted at dawn Saturday to the hospital from his residence in Shariff Aguak, the capital town of Maguindanao, which was declared under Martial Law on Sunday. At least four arms cache have been unearthed from shallow pits or found stacked in a warehouse and the residence of Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. of Datu Unsay municipality. The younger Ampatuan was held as the principal suspect in the massacre.

Ampatuan Sr, along with his other sons and nephews, has been indicted in the murder of 57 persons on November 23 in Ampatuan town. The victims were members of the political rival, Mangudadatu clan, mostly women, and accompanied by two women lawyers and 30 journalists. Another journalists was believed to have been included in the massacre but who was not officially included in the list of the victims, the HongKong-based Asian Human Rights Council said in its posting last week.

Maj. Randolph Cabangbang, spokesman of the Armed Forces' Eastern Mindanao Command, said that the elder Ampatuan was in good condition at the camp.

On Sunday, government operatives raided the unfinished palatial home of the Ampatuans in Juna Subdivision and reporters and photographers covering the raid reported in their respective papers of the purported “lavish” lifestyle of the owner.

In the Mindanao Daily Mirror, the banner story of the paper was about the Ampatuan home.
“The main house—if such a structure can still be called one—is testimony to the high-rolling lifestyle the Ampatuans. It puts to shame some of the major hotels here in the city. It was a page cut out from Architectural Digest’s top ten French villas.”