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Witnesses saw Ampatuan ordering the killings; police, soldiers joined in the massacre

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Published:  November 26, 2009 | Author:  AFP
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Philippine prosecutors will soon decide whether to charge the prime suspect who surrendered on Thursday, the government said.

A short inquest was held in the southern Philippine city of General Santos in which the state prosecutor heard preliminary evidence given by police, victims' relatives and the suspect after he was taken into custody.

Devanadera told reporters after the hearing that prosecutors would evaluate the evidence and decide by the weekend whether criminal charges would be brought against the suspect, Andal Ampatuan Jr.

"Wait until we come out with our resolution in 36 hours," Devanadera said, when asked if charges would be laid.

At the hearing, victims' relatives asked prosecutors to charge Ampatuan with multiple murders.

Hatchet man

Feared and loathed by his enemies, Ampatuan Jr. is known as the "hatchet man" of a powerful Muslim clan in the southern Philippines whose family history is written in blood.

A chubby, stone-faced man in his 40s with a penchant for expensive guns, Ampatuan Jr. is the son and namesake of the clan patriarch who has ruled as governor of Maguindanao province for most of this decade.

Ampatuan and his father have long had reputations for using fear and violence to stifle opponents and expand their power, according to the country's top human rights officials and others who have knowledge about the family.

"The Maguindanao political warlords are really the ones giving crucial, or swing votes to administration candidates," Leila de Lima, the chairwoman of the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, told AFP.

She said the Ampatuan family "act like Gods" in Maguindanao. De Lima is a former election lawyer who once represented an official who lost to an Ampatuan family member in the 2007 congressional vote allegedly through fraud.

She said the local population was fearful of the Ampatuans, noting that there had been similar, but smaller-scale killings, to Monday's massacre in Maguindanao in recent years that had been linked to the family.

Reporters in the region also said many people lived in fear of the clan.

"No one here dares to go against the Ampatuans," said one local journalist on Mindanao island, which encompasses Maguindanao.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of his own life, the reporter said Ampatuan Jr. had a reputation for violence. "It is public knowledge that he is the 'hatchet man' for the family," said the reporter, who has covered the clan's rise to power. "He and his armed bodyguards would kill at the slightest provocation."

In Monday's massacre, the military said about 100 of Ampatuan's gunmen abducted some of his rival's relatives and aides, plus a group of journalists, and shot them at close range.

Fifty-seven people have been confirmed killed, with nearly half of the victims believed to be journalists who had nothing to do with any political rivalry.

The Ampatuans belong to an old warrior lineage in Maguindanao, and local press reports say their forefathers fought against the Spanish and American colonisers as well as Japanese invaders over the centuries.

Muslims on Mindanao island have a fierce history of resisting outside rulers, a tradition that continues today with an insurgency that has claimed more than 150,000 lives since the late 1970s, according to military figures.

Many Ampatuan clan members also fought military repression during the martial law rule of Ferdinand Marcos, according to Julkipli Wadi, an Islamic studies scholar at the University of the Philippines.

Their rise to political prominence, however, came when Andal Ampatuan Sr. was named officer-in-charge of the province after Marcos fell in 1986, Wadi told AFP.

He eventually was elected governor of the province in 2001, and has since consolidated his grip on power by stock-piling arms and co-opting government militiamen deputised to fight against insurgent groups, he said. "The Ampatuans are the political warlords in the area. Any attempt at politics by a rival family they consider as threat to their rule is violently cut short," Wadi said. "They shared power amongst themselves, ruling with an iron fist in Maguindanao backed up by their huge armory."