THE usual suspects caught in an unusually dastardly crime.
At least three policemen are accused of kidnapping and killing a Korean businessman in their own PNP headquarters, Camp Crame, forever to be known as Camp Crime. They and four cohorts earned P5 million after disposing of their victim on the same day he was abducted in October 2016. They cremated his body and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
Not satisfied, they demanded another P4 million from the Korean’s wife.
Arrested after three long months, two of the three suspects are now telling unusual stories. SPO4 Villegas said it was SPO3 Sta. Isabel who killed their prey. SPO3 Sta. Isabel, speaking through his wife, named an “attorney” and a “colonel,” two men with the same surname, as the brains behind the kidnap-slay. She said a taped telephone conversation supposedly in her possession will show how the two used her husband as the scapegoat, even ordering him to kill four cops in a script to take down the Korean as a “drug lord.”
SPO3 Villegas is asking for protection as a state witness – how much more bizarre can we get? He has been provided not one, not two, but three lawyers from the Public Attorney’s Office, at taxpayers’ expense.
As the outrage grew, some famous politicians were yelling for Chief PNP Bato’s head (in part because he’s a media celebrity), all of which was cut short by President Duterte’s defense of his top cop. Bato stays, and that was that.
With the eyes of the world on thousands of unexplained, uninvestigated “deaths under investigation” in the PNP war against drugs, will the President use the unusually bad cops in this case to do a Lim Seng? In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos singled out one drug lord by the name of Lim Seng for execution. Forty-five years later, even without martial law, maybe we need just one of our usual suspects to be held up as an example of justice without mercy. (Jullie Y. Daza)