Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1901 — MURDERS BY FILIPINOS. [ARTICLE]

MURDERS BY FILIPINOS.

Shocking: Crimes Are Committed by Organized Panin. A Philippine mail brings to the War Department the records in eleven cases wherein Filipinos were tried by military commissions on charges including murder, kidnaping, assuult nnd battery, burglary and violation of the rules of war. especially notable case arose out of the operations of a famous oath-bound band of Filipinos called the society of the “Snndatahans.” The principal officers of this society, next to a triumvirate of chiefs, are a chief executioner and assistants, and a requisite number of grave diggers who participate in the selfappointed work of the band. The leaders select their victim, capture and carry him away in the night to a secret rendezvous on a sandy beach covered with very tall grass, where the diggers already have prepared a grave. Here, in the presence of the assembled band, helpless men and women from time to time have been stabbed to death nnd tossed into the graves. The members of the band thefi disperse, and trust to the rise nnd fall of the near-by waters to hide the evidence of their ghastly work. Ten members of the band, including two of the chiefs, were tried before a military commission, and eight of them were sentenced to be hanged.