Supt. Maria Christina Nobleza has a lot of explaining to do in light of last Saturday’s incident at a checkpoint in Clarin town, Bohol province in which she was accompanied by a young man who has ties to the Abu Sayaf.
The man who drove Nobleza’s vehicle, identified as Renierio Dongon alias “Kudri”, is said to be a brother-in-law of Khadaffy Abubakar Janjalani, the founding leader of the Abu Sayyaf who got killed in Sept. 2006.
Her silence doesn’t help her cause along with the fact that her vehicle drove past a checkpoint near the area where government troops and Abu Sayyaf bandits clashed in a firefight over the weekend.
As if that wasn’t incriminating enough, she rode in a vehicle that was filled to capacity with food and provisions, including shirts and diving equipment.
Nobleza said she was in a tour when she passed by the area, but if that were the case, she wouldn’t have driven past the checkpoint and gladly obliged with the inspection being a police official herself.
She also supposedly tossed aside her cell phone whose sim card contained a text message from one of the three remaining bandits, one of whom is rumored to be a son of a sultan.
These circumstances alone may or may not provide strong legal basis for filing charges against Nobleza, but it is more than enough for her to be detained at the Bohol provincial police for questioning to determine once and for all if she is in fact in cahoots with the Abu Sayyaf bandits.
Given her rank and position as a deputy chief of the PNP crime lab in Davao Region, it’s not too hard to imagine that there are others like her way up in the PNP hierarchy that have contacts with the Abu Sayyaf and are in cahoots with them insofar as kidnap-for-ransom activities are concerned.
This disturbing development also begs the question as to how extensive is the connection between the Abu Sayyaf and the bad eggs in the military and the police, a thing which these government institutions may vehemently deny until they’re blue in the face.
Nobleza may claim that the items found in her service vehicle may have been planted, but the burden of proof lies squarely on her. Police may verify if she indeed has ties with the bandit group other than purely monetary.
The incident also signified anew just how crucial the habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) driver’s information was in providing the lead for government troops to zero in and take the fight to the bandits.
The bandits who first arrived on shore in Inabanga town, Bohol during Holy Week may not have worked out their plans right, but they did have backup and based on last Monday’s checkpoint incident, it may have come in the form of some inside assistance from within the police.
Which is all the more reason why citizens and stakeholders in general should exercise more vigilance not only in monitoring these bandits but those in cahoots with them whose salaries we pay with our taxes.