MORE drug suspects on President Rodrigo Duterte’s list will fall in the coming days, Philippine National Police chief Ronald dela Rosa said Monday.
“There will be more. Just wait,” Dela Rosa said, one day after Ozamiz City Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog and his wife Susan and 10 others were killed in a police raid on their property. Police said the mayor’s men opened fire on them, triggering a two-hour long shootout that left 12 people, including the mayor, dead.
But a man claiming to be a survivor of the raid told ABS-CBN News that nobody on the mayor’s side had opened fire, and that the police had started the raid by hurling a grenade into the mayor’s house.
Duterte last year said Parojinog was among the mayors on his list that were involved in the illegal drug trade.
The mayor’s daughter, Nova Princess Echavez and his son Reynaldo Jr., who were arrested, were flown to Manila and brought to Camp Crame Sunday and detained at the PNP’s Custodial Center after being booked.
Dela Rosa said they were doing an extensive case build-up against the drug suspects on Duterte’s list of narco-politicians.
He said the death of Parojinog and the 11 others “should serve as a warning to everyone.”
“The PNP will not be cowed by a person’s status when it comes to law enforcement,” he said. “As far as law enforcement is concerned, we have no fear or favor.”
Since November last year, two other mayors on Duterte’s list have been killed.
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Slain mayor’s daughter (who is also Ozamiz vice mayor) and his son Reynaldo Parojinog Jr., detained at Camp Crame, are to be charged with illegal possession of drugs, firearms, according to the Department of Justice.
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They were Samsudin Dimaukon of Datu Saudi-Ampatuan, who was killed as he and his men were reportedly transporting illegal drugs in Makilala, North Cotabato, and Rolando Espinosa, who was killed in his jail cell in a Leyte jail by a police raiding team that said he had fired on them first.
Dela Rosa defended the police raid on Parojinog, whom he said was involved in a bank robbery and kidnapping case in Metro Manila, and who had links to the Martilyo Gang and the Kuratong Baleleng Group.
“It is a legitimate operation,” he said.
But doubts were cast on the operation when it was learned that the raiding team had disabled the CCTV cameras in the house of Nova Princess while the raid was going on.
Dela Rosa said this was improper, and that he would have Chief Insp. Jovie Espenido, police chief of Ozamiz City, investigated.
“That is not right. That is the reason we are inviting the media, barangay officials each time there is an operation, so we can be transparent. The CCTV forms part of that transparency,” Dela Rosa said.
Director Roel Obusan of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group said the raiding team had no intention of killing anyone.
“It just happened that they engaged our men,” Obusan said, adding that one of their men was slightly injured as a result of the volley of shots that met them as they approached the mayor’s house.
He cited the arrest of Nova Princess and brother Reynaldo Jr. as proof that they were not sent to liquidate the mayor and his family.
Dela Rosa said if he would have his way, he would have wanted Parojinog alive to answer the charges against him, but said he wanted his men to be alive even more.
“After the smoke clears, it should be the good man standing and the bad man lying on the pavement,” he said.
Nova Princess and Reynaldo Jr., the two children of slain Parojinog, were to be charged Tuesday before the Justice Department.
Inquest proceedings were scheduled on Monday, but the CIDG asked that they be held at 1.p.m. Tuesday in Camp Crame instead.
Police said about P1.4 million in cash, half a kilo of what appeared to be shabu and firearms were taken from the vice mayor’s home.
Ferdinand Topacio, counsel for the vice mayor, said they will seek the dismissal of the charges, and questioned the legality of the police raid.
Topacio questioned why the raid was conducted at 2:30 a.m., when rules require that search warrants be served in the daytime.
He also said his client should be released because the PNP failed to file a complaint within the 36-hour period prescribed by law.
The lawyer of the Parojinogs disputed police claims that the raiders were met with a volley of gunfire from the mayor’s security personnel when they were about to serve the search warrants for the alleged presence of illegal drugs and unlicensed firearms.
Documents showed that six search warrants were signed by Executive Judge Cecilyn Burgos-Villavert of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 89.
The warrants specified that authorities were allowed to conduct searches at “any time” during day or night.
Magdalo party-list Rep. Gary Alejano, a critic of the administration, said the predawn police raid on Sunday was “highly suspicious” but acknowledged that Parojinog was a “big fish in the war on drugs.”
“I was there in Ozamiz in 2013, I campaigned there. Almost everybody was afraid of the Parojinogs,” Alejano said.
“It is only right that the law caught up with them, they should pay for what they did in the past,” he added, saying the Parojinogs have been linked to kidnapping.
Kabayan party-list Rep. Harry Roque said any doubt on the legality of the killings arising from the police anti-drug raids against the Parojinog political clan should be resolved by an impartial investigation to be carried out by the Justice Department.
Senator Francis Escudero on Monday said a search warrant should not be a “death warrant” and said the Senate could investigate the Ozamiz City killings.
Escudero, a member of the majority bloc in the Senate, said he would not be surprised if one of his colleagues would file a resolution to investigate what happened.
Liberal Party president Senator Francis Pangilinan cited the suspicious circumstances behind the raid: a search warrant being served past 2 a.m., and the disabling of CCTV cameras.
He also said there were no injuries to the police.
Senator Panfilo Lacson said “whatever are the circumstances of the deaths, at least this time, the mayor and the others killed were not under detention in a government facility.”
Lacson, a former police chief, was referring to the killing of Espinosa inside his jail cell last year.
A Palace official said the Commission on Human Rights and the Office of the Ombudsman need not secure the permission of the President to investigate the Ozamiz City raid.
“There is a presumption of regularity in all this. If there is anyone who will complain that something irregular happened, then an investigation will have to be done. For now, we presume regularity,” Senior Deputy Executive Secretary Menardo Guevarra said of Parojinog’s case.
The statement ran counter to the President’s earlier statements warning the CHR and the Office of the Ombudsman to stop investigating his war on drugs.
The Palace official said that while Duterte instructed the police to hunt down all names in his narco-list, this does not mean that he is aware of the details of all police operations.
“The President need not be involved in things like this. These are police matters and the police will have to take care of that. They have their own internal procedures for dealing with matters like this,” Guevarra said.
“As far as I know, aside from his general instruction to eliminate drugs and all people who supported the illegal drug trade, he has no particular or specific participation in any of the actual police operations,” he added.
He also told administration critics to file charges if they believed there were irregularities in the way the raid was conducted. With Maricel V. Cruz, Macon Ramos-Araneta and John Paolo Bencito
