Scene of the Crime Operatives (Soco) from the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) examine the crime scene where former Cebu City prosecutor Mary Ann Castro was shot dead by motorcycle-riding assailants amid a slow moving traffic in the evening of Jan. 17, 2019. |CDND File Photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines – The dashcam footages from the yellow Nissan Juke owned by slain former assistant Cebu City Prosecutor Mary Ann Castro may still be retrieved after they were reportedly erased.
Superintendent Frankie Jingle Lugo, head of the Special Investigation Task Group (SITG) Castro formed by the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO), told reporters in an interview Thursday afternoon, February 14, that they will be submitting the dashcam of Castro’s car to the Anti-Cybercrime Group of the Philippine National Police for further examination.
“Yung footages sa dashcam, retrievable naman yun. Lahat nang activities sa camera, mareretrieve yun. Depende (how long) yung process pero based sa nakaraang experiences namin, involving cellphones, around one week,” Lugo said.
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Supt. Frankie Jingle Lugo of the Investigation, Detection and Management Branch of the Cebu City Police Office now heads the Special Investigation Task Group Castro tasked to solve the ambush involving former assistant Cebu City Prosecutor Mary Ann Castro.
Last week, the family of Castro revealed over radio dyHP that they discovered that the dashboard camera (dashcam) of the prosecutor’s car had no recorded footages and was seemed to have been wiped clean.
No one, not even the police who responded to the crime scene, could explain why the dashcam’s recorder was empty of footages when it was supposed to continously record what is happening in front and/or behind the car, and store the same in a built-in memory card.
Lugo also said that aside from reconstructing the dashcam’s footages, they have obtained several footages from closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras near the ambush site, showing the moments before Castro was waylaid while she was driving her car along Escario Street on January 17.
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Lugo said they will submit the CCTV videos they acquired to the PNP’s Anti-Cybercrime Group in the hope identifying and finding the motorcycle-riding gunmen.
Castro served as an assistant prosecutor in Cebu City and a prosecutor of Talisay City before she was transferred to Masbate province in 2017./