Top senior Philippine cops accused of murder
MANILA: Senior Philippine National Police (PNP) officers, headed by a general, have been charged with murder for their alleged involvement in the death of a security aide of an official of Abra province in the Northern Luzon highlands last March.
Named in the criminal complaint were Brigadier General Ronald Lee, the chief of the PNP regional command in the Cordillera Administrative Region in Northern Luzon; Colonel Maly Cula, the acting Abra police provincial head, and several other policemen.
Aside from murder, the accused were also charged with alleged perjury and incriminating an innocent person, said Eric Distor, the officer-incharge of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). But efforts to contact them for their side failed. Distor said the murder case arose from a complaint filed by Mayor Mark Roland Somera of the town of Pilar, Abra and his sister Vice Mayor Jaja Josefina Somera Disono.
Another complainant was the sister of Sandee Boy Bermudo, Disono’s security aide who was killed in the alleged ambush.
Distor said they filed the murder case following findings by NBI investigators that the police allegedly deliberately fired at Disono’s convoy under the guise of conducting a legitimate checkpoint along a street in Pilar in March.
The policemen, Distor said, claimed they had received information that a group of armed men was seen roaming around Pilar on board a Toyota van with an unknown plate number.
However,nbiagentshadestablishedthatbased on closed circuit television footages, there was no visible checkpoint in the area at that time, according to Distor. The agents also belied the police claim that the group ignored their order to stop and instead rammed through the alleged checkpoint.
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has deputised the PNP and the Armed Forces of the Philippines to help maintain clean, honest and fair polls on May 9.
About 65 million Filipinos are to go to the polls on May 9 to elect the president, vice president, senators and candidates seeking more than 18,000 local positions at stake like governor, congressman and mayor.