Police Colonel Joie Yape | Contributed photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Special Investigation Task Group (SITG) for the slay of Police Lieutenant Colonel Joie Yape, have acquired footage of two security cameras from the establishments near the crime scene.
Police Colonel Geovanie Maines, officer-in-charge of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) and the commander of the SITG for Yape slay, told reporters this morning, November 25, 2019, that they had submitted the closed circuit television (CCTV) footage to the Regional Anti-Cyber Crime Office in Central Visayas (RACO-7) to be enhanced into a clearer version of the footage.
Read more: Former PIB chief, Yape, shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Cebu City
Maines said this would hopefully give them the lead on the identity of the suspects.
He also said that the team believed that the motive of the killing was job related.
He also revealed that they had new leads in the case, but he did not provide more details because they were still verifying the data that they had gathered on the case.
Read more: Cebu City police forms Special Intelligence Task Group to look into cop’s murder
However, he said that they were digging deeper into Yape’s previous investigations while he was still the Provincial Investigation Branch (PIB) chief of the Cebu Provincial Police Office (CPPO).
They were focusing on his cases involving fellow fellow police officers, whom he investigated for being involved in illegal activities.
He said they were also checking on the clashes Yape had with local politicians that he had investigated when he was still a PIB chief in 2017.
Police Brigadier General Valeriano de Leon, PRO-7 chief, for his part, said that he too believed that Yape’s killing was work related.
But De Leon said that they had yet to clearly establish the motive until they could get new evidence on the case or identify or arrest a suspect.
“Merong mga nahuli yan in the past, naipakulong yan in the past, o naimbistigahan in the past, na baka malapit na siya sa dulo ng kangyang pag-iimebistiga at ngayon naman nagkaroon ng ganyang pangyayari,” said De Leon
([He] has arrested persons in the past and have investigated cases where he may have been close to solving the case and then the incident happened.)
He said he would be setting a timeline for the case but this would depend on how strong the lead that the SITG would be able to gather.
Maines said that Yape was a PIB chief in 2017 until January 2019 when he was reassigned as the police chief of Calbayog City in Samar province.
In June 2019, Yape was reassigned to the Philippine National Police headquarters in Camp Crame where he was designated as an investigator of the Internal Affairs Services./dbs