MANILA, Phillipines -- Unidentified gunmen men shot to death a woman deputy mayor and two others in a volley of gunfire Wednesday at an outdoor opposition election rally in a remote southern town, officials said.
Deputy Mayor Rosita Villafuerte of the town of Sipocot, in Camarines Sur province 150 miles southeast of Manila, was killed with a single bullet fired at the back of her head.
A flurry of gunfire followed, killing a village chief and one of some 500 spectators, the opposition United Nationalist Democratic Organization said in a statement.
Mrs. Villafuerte had just delivered her speech shortly after midnight Tuesday when the unidentified men shot her.
The deaths brought to 10 the toll of lives in violence related to elections May 14 for 183 seats in the National Assembly.
Mrs. Villafuerte was campaigning for her brother-in-law, assemblyman Luis Villafuerte, a former trade minister in the government of President Ferdinand Marcos who joined the opposition.
The assemblyman is seeking re-election under the banner of UNIDO, a coalition of 17 parties.
'We have received death threats since the beginning of the campaign but we did not expect something like this to happen,' Villafuerte told reporters in Sipocot.
A human rights group, meanwhile, said three people involved in a protest near the U.S. Embassy had disappeared and quoted witnesses as saying they were picked up by police.
The missing people had been among some 2,000 marchers walking behind a hearse carrying the remains of four anti-government activists believed to have been killed by the military.
The bodies of the political activists, three of them students, were found in shallow graves March 31 in an isolated sugar cane field about 30 miles south of Manila.
They had been missing since they disappeared from a mass opposition rally in Manila March 7.
A spokesman for Task Force Detainess of the Philippines said four plainclothes police tailing the march Tuesday in an unmarked car 'suddenly' tried to apprehend a group of five marchers.
Two of the marchers were able to evade the officers during a scuffle but three others were nabbed, TFDP said.
A police spokesman said he had no information on the reports.
Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, a church-run group, claims to have documented 1,387 summary executions by the military since 1973.
