COTABATO CITY — Three Boy Scouts died, while 11 other scouts were hurt on Thursday morning when a tent with metal materials, they were transferring to a strategic spot in a camping site in Zamboanga City hit a dangling power transmission cable.

Officials of the Zamboanga City Police Office and Brig. Gen. Bowenn Joey M. Masauding, director of the Police Regional Office-9, separately told reporters on Thursday that the electrocution incident in the highland Abong-abong area left three students, Kevin S. Iquid, Geoffrey N. Atillano and Alvin B. Gaspar, dead.

Sources from the Department of Education-9 and employees of the Zamboanga City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRRMO) were quoted in radio reports as saying that three of the eleven other scouts transported by emergency responders to a hospital for treatment of injuries due to accidental electrocution are in critical condition.

Education officials overseeing the scouting jamboree, among them Butch I. Alejabo and the lawyer Jay-Ar  D. Ortega, had told reporters that the victims got electrocuted when the tent with metal framings they were carrying overhead hit a dangling power line of the Zamboanga City Electric Cooperative.

Mr. Masauding said their investigators, officials of the Bureau of Fire Protection and personnel of the Zamboanga CDRRMO, under Mayor John M. Dalipe, shall soon release a common report on the deadly incident. — John Felix M. Unson

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