A farmer and seven other people were killed in Zamboanga del Norte after a mortar shell he had found at work exploded, police said Thursday.
The incident that took place on Wednesday at a rubber plantation in the fourth-class municipality of Sirawai also saw five others wounded.
Those killed and injured were relatives and neighbors of rubber tapper Marcelo Antogan, 21, who was also killed himself.
It was Antogan who brought home the shell without knowing what it was and tinkered with it.
“He must have thought it contained gold somehow,” police officer Almacer Tabalang told AFP by telephone, adding that parts of the elongated shell had a golden sheen.
Tabalang said the region was a 1990s battleground between government forces and the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic militant group that later pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
He said it was possible the mortar shell was dropped by the combatants at the time, and that farmers who worked at the rubber plantation were unfamiliar with these types of munitions. (Agence France Presse)
