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Bomb blasts hurt 33 at Philippine boxing match

Manila - The victims include at least 10 children aged 7 to 15 years old.

At least 33 people were wounded when two bombs exploded while they were watching a boxing competition in a central Philippine town as part of an annual Roman Catholic holiday festival, police and other officials said on Thursday.
Sixteen of the wounded were admitted to various hospitals while 16 others went home after treatment of their injuries from the late-Wednesday twin blasts in Hilongos town in Leyte province, said Senior Inspector Jenyzen Enciso, the provincial police spokeswoman.
In the first incident, two bombs exploded late Wednesday in the central island of Leyte, wounding 27 people who were watching a boxing match in Hilongos, police said.
Another unexploded bomb was also found in the town, which is about 620 kilometres (385 miles) south of Manila, said the town's mayor Albert Villahermosa.
A bomb went off on a highway on the southern island of Mindanao barely an hour later, wounding six people, the military said.
"A lamppost was catapulted from the impact of the explosion," said Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Delos Reyes.
The blast in Aleosan, hundreds of kilometres south of Hilongos, was close to the site of a Christmas Eve church bombing that injured 13.
Police recovered an 81 mm mortar cartridge and a cellphone apparently used to detonate the homemade bombs, she said.
Nobody has claimed responsibility and investigators were trying to identify the attackers.
The victims include at least 10 children aged 7 to 15 years old.
Police said it was too early to say if the Wednesday bombings were connected or what the perpetrators' motives might be.
Mindanao has been wracked by bombings and other forms of violence carried out by militants who consider the region as their ancestral homeland, leading to separatist conflicts with the government.
The extremists have also been blamed for bombings outside Mindanao, such as the discovery of a bomb near the US embassy in Manila in November.
In the deadliest recent such attack, 15 people were killed in an explosion in President Rodrigo Duterte's hometown of Davao in Mindanao in September.