There were 45 unsolved murders in Metro Cebu in one month but the Police Regional Office (PRO-7) isn’t too alarmed about it and they said neither should the public since it’s being blown out of proportion.
“Perhaps, it just so happened that the incident came one after the other. But you just cannot lump these killings into one. Each has its own circumstance, be it personal grudge, work-related, jealousy, or illegal drugs,” said Chief Supt. Robert Quenery, PRO-7 chief.
The region’s top cop also accused the media of making it appear that there is an unbroken string or series of killings in Metro Cebu, particularly Cebu City where a series of high profile murders occurred including the latest failed attempt to take out Wellington Lim, younger brother of businessman and drug suspect Peter Lim.
There may be a point to Quenery’s contention since not all of the 45 unsolved murders are drug-related, only most of them are. And the pattern is quite unmistakable; the perpetrators are unidentified, masked motorcycle-riding — or more popularly known as riding-in-tandem — assailants who shoot and speed away once they finish their target.
That’s a fact that not even Quenery nor his subordinates in the PRO-7 or any police unit in Central Visayas can conveniently ignore nor dismiss as exaggeration by the media.
When faced with these figures, Quenery nor his higher-ups in Camp Crame cannot afford to ignore nor relegate this as “isolated” and blame the media for blowing up the unsolved murders — with emphasis on unsolved — out of proportion.
One such example of an unsolved murder was the daylight ambush of Ronda Vice Mayor and lawyer Jonah John Ungab, whose family had been waiting for nearly a month for any positive leads in the case.
Ungab’s killers were, again, motorcycle-riding assailants. But in the case of former Talisay City Councilor Emil Go and now Wellington Lim, the perpetrators were on board sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and they never allowed anyone like security guards and witnesses to stop them.
As to the police’s assurance that Metro Cebu’s peace and order remains stable, that assessment was off the mark if one were to ask the families and relatives of those caught in the crossfire in last Friday’s ambush of Lim which claimed the life of security guard Wilson Bucag and injured security guard George Lambatan and Germans Pauline Basbach and Manuel Georrings.
Whoever masterminded the killings — and they may be different, unrelated people or had connections to the authorities or drug syndicates or whatever — appear to be emboldened in their activities due to the remote possibility of them being uncovered, let alone arrested for their crimes.
And like Bucag, innocent bystanders can be caught and killed in the crossfire.
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