The killers of a former rebel who succumbed to 18 gunshot wounds in a shooting on Sunday in Barangay Macabaclay here have identified themselves as New People’s Army (NPA) members, a witness told probers.
The witness who rushed, along with his family to the crime scene after hearing successive gunshots, said two of the suspects on board a single motorcycle told them not to interfere.
“Do not interfere, " the 49 - year-old farm worker quoted one of the suspects as saying. “We are NPAs,” the suspect reportedly added.
The victim, Renato Saddoy, 49, married and a farmer was an NPA member in 1980s and an active member of the militant Alab Katipunan at the time of the assault, police said.
The suspects reportedly used cal. 45 pistols, based on the empty shells lifted from the crime scene by the operatives.
SPO1 Adrian Sioson, investigator said, said the witness first saw the four suspects at about 7:30 a.m. passed by in front of his house riding in tandem on board two motorcycles along the feeder road from Barangay Santor, in this town.
All of the suspects have their faces covered with t-shirts, a normal get-up of onion farmers and traders in the area.
“After few minutes he (witness) and his family left on board their tricycle, passed by and saw the four suspects sitting on their parked motorcycles,” Sioson said.
They have also met on the way the victim, driving a hand tractor, a farm implement, towards the direction of the suspects.
Soon, they heard the gunshots prompting them to return until they found the victims body and were told by the suspects to keep themselves away from the incident.
The victim’s wife Jinky told police she would cooperate in the investigation after the victim is interred.
http://www.pna.gov.ph/index.php?idn=2&sid=&nid=2&rid=625954
Alab Katipunan is the political wing of the breakaway Rebolusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa ng Pilipinas (RPM-P) Revolutionary Workers Party of the Philippines). The military wing is the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPA-ABB).
ReplyDeleteThe RPM-P/RPA-ABB entered into a ceasefire/peace agreement with the Philippine government in 2000 and as a consequence, the Alab Katipunan morphed into a party-list political party and has fielded candidates for political office in recent elections.
Many of the members of RPM-P/RPA-ABB used to belong to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)/New People's Army (NPA) and broke away from the Maoists following the ideological split that took place within the CPP in the early 1990s.
As a result, there has been no love lost between these groups and the NPA has targeted a number of RPM-P/RPA-ABB leaders for assassination. The murder of Renato Saddoy by suspected NPA hitmen described above appears to be part of this longstanding struggle between the two communist groups.