The successive killings of four young men, Kian de los Santos, Carlo Angelo Arnaiz, Reynaldo de Guzman, and Vaughn Dicang, whose bodies were found in different locations all in the space of some three weeks, bear striking similarities even from a layman’s observation.
Eerie similarities.
In the case of Kian, it could have been clear murder on the part of three policemen who took the “license to kill” in the event of violent resistance as pure license to murder an innocent person and use the same as a “trophy” in the war against drugs.
Similar killings may have indeed been done elsewhere, either by deranged police personnel or worse, vigilantes with a misguided sense of instant justice. Whether perpetrated by officers of the law without provocation or violent resistance from the suspects, or by vigilantes, the acts are criminal and ought to be investigated and prosecuted. Justice must be served.
Having said that, though, in the case of Kian de los Santos, the three policemen who participated in his apprehension followed by his killing have been placed in the slammer, and are soon to face charges for the gruesome murder of the young man. No less than the President met with the parents of Kian and assured them that justice will be done.
Some people clearly went overboard in trying to make the Kian killing a political cassus belli with intent to destabilize government. They failed.
Then a few days later, the body of Carl Arnaiz was found in a grassy sidewalk somewhere in Caloocan. The young man was from Cainta, Rizal. Several kilometers separate northeastern NCR from Caloocan in its west.
Police initially claimed that Arnaiz and a companion tried to rob a taxicab driver near the area where the body was found, and came out with not one, but two affidavits from the taxi driver with strange dissimilarities. The taxicab driver, as this is written, is missing.
The plot thickens. The Public Attorney’s Office sent its medico-legal experts to the area where the body was found, and strangely, the grass over which the “shooting” was done was hardly disturbed, indicating that there was no violent resistance, and the poor young man must have been killed elsewhere and the body dumped in Caloocan. No bullet slugs were found. Neither blood stains which do not get erased that easily on grass or sod.
Then, Reynaldo’s body was again, so strangely discovered in a creek in Gapan City, Nueva Ecija, more than a hundred kilometers from both Caloocan and Cainta several days later. Not only was he gruesomely murdered, with 28 or so stab wounds indicating a slow death, but the poor teenager’s face was wrapped in plastic tape. Surely not one who “resisted” arrest.
And almost at the same time, another young man’s body was found on another creek, already in advanced state of decomposition, after having been reported missing by his family since the first of September. Another creek, this time in Baguio City.
The series of gruesome incidents, particularly the last three, those of Carl, “Kulot” and Vaughn following the “botched” political attempt to make the Kian murder a symbol of an “oppressive” government making its war on drugs as an “extrajudicial” killing spree, does make President Duterte’s pronouncement suspecting “sabotage” very possible.
No, not just possible, but very probable.
This is not to accuse, nor even suspect, the politicians who tried to make a political cassus belli out of Kian’s murder by the police as capable of perpetrating such heinous, such sinister conspiracy with blood on their hands. Far from it.
This is to posit something in the realm of the probable.
What if drug lords and their protectors, still very much around, alive and kicking, saw the murder of Kian de los Santos and the initial state of revulsion by a shocked public as a means to “sabotage” (in the words of President Duterte), the publicly accepted war on drugs as a just war?
What if the drug lords and/or their protectors, some of them police officers themselves, retired or resigned, found reason to thwart the war on drugs that was killing their lucrative business and ride on the crest of public anger over the Kian murder?
These drug lords have their tentacles all over the country, whether in Cainta, or Caloocan, or Baguio, or Gapan, or anywhere else in this land benighted by shabu.
And are they succeeding in their contra-guerra through sabotage. Even the Archbishop of Manila, the cautious and circumspect Cardinal Luis Tagle, has chimed in with an admonition that “killing is not the way to govern a nation.”
Think of it. Surely in the realm of the probable.
Vit Aguirre has a king-size headache.
