[Reuters]

Published date: 7th Aug 1987

7 August 1987

Reuters News

English

(c) 1987 Reuters Limited

MANILA, Aug 7, Reuter – Extra bodyguards were assigned to top Philippine officials today after a congressional leader and the country’s election commission chief received death threats from Communist and Moslem guerrillas.

Amid rising public outrage, police admitted they were no nearer solving the murders of Local Government

Secretary Jaime Ferrer, assassinated on Sunday, and of a retired naval officer considered close to Ferrer who was killed yesterday.

Military sources said police patrols had been intensified and more guards assigned to government officials after intelligence reports said a nine-member Moslem rebel hit squad planned to kill Ramon Mitra, Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Yesterday an angry Mitra called for the resignation of police officials for their failure to Identify Ferrer’s killers.

The military sources said Ramon Felipe, Chairman of the Commission on Elections, and two of his colleagues received separate death threats last night from the Communist New People’s Army (NPA).

“We consider all officials as under threat,” said Colonel Fernando Angara, police chief in the Manila suburb where Ferrer died in an ambush. “Even I am a potential target.” Angara said the Ferrer investigation was “still very much open”.

Manila newspapers reported today that Angara’s deputy, Major Jose Balbas had been removed from his post for failing in the murder investigation. But Angara said Balbas had been assigned to a task force set up to end the impasse.

Two men detained as prime suspects in the Ferrer killing, the latest in a long string of unsolved crimes, were freed after investigators failed to come up with evidence against them.

One of them, a former Moslem rebel leader, was captured in a highly-publicised raid led by Manila’s Governor Jejomar Binay. The other, suspected of being one of the three gunmen who shot Ferrer, was not recognised by eyewitnesses in two police identity parades and showed no traces of having recently fired a gun when tested.

The controversy over the murder Investigations drew a sharp retort from Brigadier-General Alexander Aguirre, Manila’s military commander. He said the police were being used as a whipping boy by congressional leaders like Mitra.

“If we have this problem, is it the fault of the police? We should not be stabbed in the back while we are fighting,” Aguirre told reporters.

Ferrer, 70, was an outspoken anti-communist but had also earned unpopularity by sacking many provincial officials appointed by former President Ferdinand Marcos.

His associate Rosendo Nuval, a retired navy commander, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Manila’s tourist district yesterday.

On Tuesday Liberato Pacar, a World War Two veteran and Ferrer’s friend, shot himself in what police described as a fit of depression over the assassination.

The outcry over Ferrer’s killing was today joined by a veterans group calling itself the Hunters ROTC Guerrillas.

It charged in full-page newspaper advertisements that the murder “dramatises the inability of government to Control the rising spread of terrorism and insurgency to the very heart of our urban centres”.

A spokeswoman for the group told Reuters the Hunters were about 100 men, mostly in their 60s, who fought alongside Ferrer against the Japanese in World War Two.

“We have mobilised our comrades-In-arms and existing network to determine the killers and those behind

them,” the advertisement said. The spokeswoman said she did not know what the group would do If it found the assassins.