By MINKA KLAUDIA S. TIANGCO
A Manila court found a former National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agent guilty of attempted homicide after shooting his fellow agent at the NBI office in 2013.
Presiding Judge Daniel Villanueva of the Manila City Regional Trial Court Branch 49 convicted NBI Special Investigator (SI) Nestor Pascual, sentencing him to six months of arresto mayor as minimum term, to four years and two months of prision correctional as maximum term.
Pascual shot NBI SI Joselito Guillen four times in different parts of the body during a party at the NBI-National Capital Region (NCR) office on Taft Avenue in Manila on January 2013.
Prior to the shooting, Pascual was allegedly drunk and claiming that someone was trying to kill him.
Guillen unloaded the magazine of Pascual’s caliber .40 pistol.
But Pascual reloaded his gun and, after a brief tug-of-war with Guillen, fired shots.
Guillen suffered gunshot wounds in the chest and back and a fractured hand. He was incapacitated for a month.
In his seven-page decision, Villanueva said the shooting appeared to be intentional and motivated by anger.
“At the precise team in question, there was no apparent or imminent threat against his person or security. He was inside the premises of the NBI. There was no allegation by anyone, or by himself for that matter, that some colleague or some person had threatened, was threatening him or had posed a threat to him. In fact, an amiable, happy social event was in progress,” Villanueva said in his decision.
“Therefore, by inference, being a professional law enforcer of the premier and renown national criminal investigative agency, his attempt to use his firearm to fire several shots, was for a lethal, aggressive purpose, to hit, to hurt and kill somebody,” he added.
During the trial, Pascual argued that he was not drunk during the incident and that he would not have shot Guillen if he did not grab his gun.
However, Villanueva said that if it was true that Pascual was in a clear and “unintoxicated” state of mind during the incident, then it further proves that the shooting was not accidental.
