IT may take months, perhaps years, to sort out the facts in the kidnapping and killing of a South Korean businessman in October, 2016. It appears he was picked up from his home in Angeles City, Pampanga, by armed men led by a policemen connected to the Anti-Illegal Drugs Group of the Philippine National Police (PNP).
The businessman was taken to Camp Crame, Quezon City, in his own car which was then parked just outside the PNP Public Information Office. There, according to investigation reports, he was strangled by the police officer. That same day, the police officer called the businessman’s wife, demanded ransom, and she subsequently gave P5 million.
The policeman demanded another P4.5 million. The body was disposed of through a funeral parlor in Caloocan City for P30,000 and the victim’s golf set.
These are the initial details of the case but they are enough to raise some very hard questions for the government.
Are some police officers taking advantage of the anti-drugs campaign to carry out their own illegal activities? In September last year, it may be recalled, a regional chairperson of Citizen Crime Watch was killed by two men riding in tandem while she was standing in front of her house in Gloria, Oriental Mindoro. The killers were pursued and cornered; they turned out to be police officers, one of them the police chief of a neighboring town.
In the case of the South Korean, he was allegedly killed right in Camp Crame, not far from where the PNP chief holds office. Has respect for the police organization and its top officials gone so low that a killing is done right at the site of its national headquarters?
The victim, Jee Ick Joo, was a former director of the South Korean heavy industries firm Hanjin, which has been building ships in Subic. South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se reportedly expressed “grave shock” over the implication of Philippine police officers in the killing. How will this incident impact on our relations with South Korea?
When Jee’s widow, Choi Kyung-jim, went to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to ask about the case, Director Roel Bolivar, chief of the Task Force on Illegal Drugs, said she told him how they had planned to stay in the Philippines, set up a business, and even establish a foundation for poor Filipino children. “They wanted to grow old here, permanently stay here in the Philippines,” he said. There are many other Koreans now living with us in many communities in the country today; will this case somehow affect their plans?
So many questions arising from one case. We urge the government to give the Jee Ick Joo kidnap-murder case the highest priority so that all the loose ends can be gathered and all the questions satisfactorily answered.