A police official, once bypassed in political choices of police director in his native Maguindanao in 2009, becomes the first Muslim-Filipino police-general among graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA).
Police Brig. Gen. Esmael Pua Ali currently heads the Regional Learning and Doctrine Development Division of the Regional Police Office of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Ali’s late father once related that it was a blessing in disguise that the powers-that-be at the time declined his son’s potential nomination to become Maguindanao’s police director, weeks before the gruesome Maguindanao Massacre happened on November 23, 2009.
Ali is a member of the PNPA Sandigan Class of 1994 for a second degree course in Bachelor of Science in Public Safety.
He finished Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the Notre Dame University in Cotabato City as a full state scholar in 1990.
Fresh from his PNPA graduation, Ali was sent to a peacekeeping deployment in Basilan where an encounter with terrorist group Abu Sayyaf became inevitable in 1994.
Ali had also been to the Philippine Police Contingents to the United Nations Peacekeeping Missions in East Timor through the UNTAET (United Nations Transitional Administration at East Timor), and later the UNMISET (United Nations Mission of Support).
Ali was again posted to a foreign assignment in the Philippine Contingent of Police Officers to the United Nations Interim Administration Mission (UNIAM) in Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia from 2003 to 2004.