MANILA, Philippines -- Masked men who tossed a grenade and fired automatic weapons today killed three and wounded eight, including a leftist university president, in a daring ambush near President Corazon Aquino's palace.
About an hour earlier, suspected communist assassins gunned down a police corporal in suburban Malabon after he escorted his two children to school to protect them from street fights in the capital.
Nemesio Prudente, 61, president of the state-run Polytechnic University, sustained five bullet and shrapnel wounds in the 8:30 a.m. ambush while en route to his office. He was hospitalized in fair condition.
Police station commander Maj. Timoteo Zarcal said four masked men struck during the morning rush hour as Prudente's vehicle passed beneath a bridge near the university and about a block from the presidential palace.
The assailants tossed a grenade inside the light-green van carrying Prudente, wounding him and five aides who flung themselves on the university official to protect him, police said.
The assailants, armed with M-16 automatic rifles and pistols, then rained gunfire on the van and a backup car carrying Prudente's bodyguards, who were armed with pistols but were unable to fight back. Three bodyguards were killed, police said.
Two bystanders also were wounded by stray bullets, police said.
Gonzalo Bautista, who witnessed the attack, said the firing lasted 10 minutes. The gunmen fled in a car waiting at the other side of the bridge, he said.
Rolando Tonco, a security guard at the university, said he rushed to the ambush site moments after the incident and saw Prudente crawling out of the van.
'Blood came out of his body and I lifted him to a car that took him to the hospital,' Tonco said.
Prudente was at suburban Lourdes Hospital, where Dr. Marcelino Reyes said he was in 'fair condition at the moment.'
Prudente later told radio station DZXL from his hospital bed he was thankful he survived his second ambush and asked Aquino to find his assailants.
Aquino said in a statement the attack on Prudente was 'brutal, brazen and condemnable.'
She directed Brig. Gen. Rodolfo Biazon, chief of the capital region defense command, to investigate the ambush and come up with a 'speedy' solution.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the ambush, the second against Prudente in eight months. In November, Prudente, a leftist, was wounded and his lawyer killed in a similar incident blamed on right-wing enemies.
In Malabon, the slaying of police Cpl. Romeo Esperidion appeared to have been carried out by the 'Sparrow' urban death squad of the communist New People's Army, which has been blamed for the slayings of more than 100 lawmen.
Prudente went underground after former President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972. He was arrested in 1985, but was freed along with communist leaders Jose Maria Sison and Bernabe Buscayno shortly after Aquino took power in February 1986.
Before his first ambush, Prudente was briefly detained Nov. 1 on charges of harboring communist guerrillas in his office. He was later released but 24 people arrested at his university were charged with subversion.
Last week, Alfonso Surigao, a human rights lawyer handling the case of the 24 men arrested at Polytechnic, was shot and killed by suspected right-wing assassins in the central city of Cebu.
