The killing of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa was so brazen, and the excuse given by the police officers for the slaying so ridiculous, there is absolutely no reason for government authorities not to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of the incident.
Why was Espinosa suddenly so brave and reckless to shoot at lawmen when just a few weeks earlier, he so feared for his life that he turned himself in to PNP Chief Director General Ronald de la Rosa on the first mention of his name in President Rodrigo Duterte’s list of alleged narco-politicians? Espinosa could hardly be described as one who would be brave enough to shoot it out with policemen. In fact, he ratted his own son and associates to save his own skin and was reportedly willing to testify against personalities he had named as being linked to the illegal drug trade in his town.
Espinosa had named 226 persons as involved in the illegal drug trade, including politicians, members of the judiciary, CIDG and PDEA officials, and media members. Forty-seven of these persons have been criminally charged, including an aunt of the CIDG officer who led the assault on Baybay jail.
The mission of the men from the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) must have been so urgent and so important that they could not wait till morning to execute their alleged search warrant.
The CIDG men, according to the seven jail guards on duty at the Baybay jail at that time, ignored their demand to show them the warrant, herded them to once corner at gunpoint, and went directly to Espinosa’s prison cell, where they were allegedly met with gunfire from Espinosa and another inmate from the adjacent cell, identified as one Raul Yap. Of course, the usual gun and packets of shabu were allegedly found in his cell.
However, the jail warden, Hormobono Bardillon, quoted his guards as saying that they heard Espinosa beg for his life.
“Ayaw gyud ko ninyo plantere, sir, wa ko armas nga gitago (Please do not plant evidence sir, I’m not hiding any firearms),” Espinosa was heard saying before gunshots rang out. Moments later, he and Yap lay dead. Did Yap really shoot it out with the policemen, too, or did he just have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, a possible witness to a murder that had to be eliminated, too?
Another factor that raised suspicions that the killing of Espinosa and Yap was a case of a rubout or an execution was that the closed circuit television footage that could have recorded the entire incident was conveniently missing.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who was himself alleged to have carried out summary executions during his stint as PNP chief, suspected as much that it was a clear case of extrajudicial killing.
Lacson believes Espinosa was silenced as he could name high-ranking PNP and government officials as protectors of illegal drug operations. “I have good information from my sources in Leyte that Kerwin (Espinosa’s son who has been arrested in Dubai) and his father shared the same records of drug payola involving police officials and other police figures, the extent of which could reach very high level, both local and national,” according to Lacson.
From the scant reports coming in based on statements from the jail warden and the guards, it would seem this is more of a rubout to silence a valuable witness against certain big-time drug lords and government officials, rather than an execution of a suspected drug dealer or user by law enforcers as has happened in the majority of the more than 4,000 already killed in Duterte’s drug war.
Lacson noted that the killing of Espinosa came a few weeks after his lawyer and aide were killed. “Mayor Espinosa’s alleged firefight with the local CIDG raiding team cannot simply be ignored as unrelated and coincidental,” he said. He advised Sen. Dick Gordon to reopen the Senate’s in vestigation into the extrajudicial killings.
Espinosa was the second town mayor named in the narco-list to have been killed under questionable circumstances. Mayor Samsudin Dimaukom of Datu Saudi Ampatuan, Maguindanao was killed along with nine of his companions in an alleged shootout with policemen manning a checkpoint in North Cotabato.
Police said Dimaukom’s three-car convoy stopped just before reaching the checkpoint, and started firing at the policemen. While they were supposed to have been the first to open fire, not one policeman was killed and all in the mayor’s convoy were shot dead.
The Senate should follow Lacson’s advice and reopen its investigation into the extrajudicial killings. A crack team of investigators from the National Bureau of Investigation should also be able to ferret out which of the killings were the results of legitimate shootouts with policemen, which were rub-outs carried out by hired gunmen or policemen, which ones were summary executions carried out by law enforcers, and which ones were murders not related to drugs.
The government’s continued inaction on these extrajudicial killings could be interpreted as a condonation of these violent acts or as a state policy. These daily killings could spiral into a culture of violence, and worse, a culture of death that could defeat any reform agenda that the Duterte administration has been implementing.
What’s the use, for example, of having peace with the Muslim rebels and the communist insurgents, if there is no peace and order in the streets? How can there be peace when dead bodies surface nearly every day, not in the hills or in the jungles but on city streets – and now even inside the country’s jails?