NPA owns killing of Cotabato security chief

From InterAksyon (Feb 9): NPA owns killing of Cotabato security chief

The New People’s Army has owned responsibility for killing the head of Cotabato province’s Civil Security Unit over the weekend.

Bernabe Abanilla and his companion, identified by police as Degul Semillano, were gunned down by three still unidentified gunmen riding a motorcycle as they got off a pickup outside the Catholic church in Barangay Doroluman in Arakan town Sunday morning.

A day later, the NPA command operating in Cotabato and Bukidnon provinces issued a statement calling Abanilla’s death “a huge victory for the people in Arakan and the revolution,” independent media outfit DavaoToday reported.

NPA spokesperson Isabel Santiago accused Abanilla, who used to be Doroluman barangay chairman, of being one of those who masterminded the murder of Italian missionary Fausto Tentorio, who was gunned down by a militiaman in the parish compound of Arakan on October 17, 2011, and of Benjaline Hernandez, former editor of Ateneo de Davao’s campus paper Atenews in April 2002, who was also killed in Arakan.

Chief Inspector Felix Fornan, Arakan police chief, said Abanilla was declared dead on arrival at a hospital from gunshots to the head and body.

Cotabato Governor Emmylou Mendoza offered a P200,000 bounty for the capture of Abanilla’s killers and called his death “a great loss of a life of a man who was a dedicated family man and who was devoted to his work.”

http://www.interaksyon.com/article/123826/npa-owns-killing-of-cotabato-security-chief