Legislators at the House quad committee’s October 22 hearing on extrajudicial killings were probing the assassination of mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan, Batangas, when questions about Police Captain Kenneth Paul Albotra’s career track broadened the crime landscape all the way to the Central Visayas (Region VII) provinces of Cebu and Negros Oriental.
By night’s end, the shift in the work locales of Albotra and his two subordinates would confront lawmakers with another legacy of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s: the unresolved killings of human rights defenders and ordinary citizens.
Lawmakers summoned Albotra after former Cebu City police chief Royina Garma bared that he had boasted about being part of the July 2, 2018, operation that killed Halili.
The revelation came as legislators raised questions about Garma’s self-confessed role in creating a national task force to expand the Davao drug war’s reward system. She also mentioned that police teams crossed geographical jurisdictions to take down high-profile drug suspects.
Albotra denied Garma’s “lies,” calling these attempts to bury her links to the killing of Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) corporate secretary Wesley Bayaruga.
Lawmakers were trying to track the movements of Albotra and his team when Oplan Sauron surfaced.
Sauron, the internal security program, stemmed from Duterte’s November 2018 Memorandum Order No. 32 against “lawless violence” in Negros and Samar islands and the Bicol region.
Under Debold Sinas, who took over as Police Region VII Office (PRO-7) chief in June 2018, Sauron unleashed eight months of killings targeting civilians suspected of supporting communist rebels.
Albotra has had an exceptionally mobile career. Lawmakers believe his assignments involved gathering intelligence for secret kill operations.
He was Cebu City Station 1 commander when a “special order” brought him to Calamba, Laguna, half an hour away from Tanauan, Batangas, as an anti-drugs intelligence officer.
That assignment was unusually short — June 4 to June 27, within five days of Hallili’s murder. Albotra also brought in two “trusted” non-commissioned officers, PO3 Eugene Calumpa and SPO3 Melgin Bolandres.
Few officers transfer to other regions with their men in tow, “unless you go there with a specific mission,” remarked Antipolo 2nd District Representative Romeo Acop, a retired police general.
Police have not solved the murder of Halili, who died from a single gunshot chest wound inflicted by a gunman 80 meters away from where the mayor was attending a flag-raising ceremony.
Before Cebu City Station 1, Alborta was deputy police chief of Dumaguete City, capital of Negros Oriental, for only four months, from late 2017 to February 2018.
After Calamba, Albotra and his two companions returned to Cebu City. They met Garma for the first time during a courtesy call on July 3 or 4. That was when Alborta told her of the Hallili slay, she claimed.
Dead and deadly
Garma didn’t blink at the slay disclosure. Albotra slid back into his old post, his men still by his side. His new boss “treated him very well.”
But events following his team’s return to Cebu seem to validate legislators’ suspicion of dirty assignments.
Calumba died on July 30, less than a month after their return, during what media reports called a foiled assasination attempt on Tejero district councilor Jessielou Cadungog.
The thundering of legislators drowned a critical Albotra’s message: while he was officially Calumba’s station chief, the slain cop had reported directly to Garma.
Sinas and Garma assumed their new Cebu offices within weeks of each other. Then-mayor Tomas Osmeña blamed them for a surge in metropolitan Cebu killings,
The Sunstar newspaper reported that seven law enforcers were shot dead between Sinas’ arrival and his reassignment to the National Capital Region police office in October 2019.
”I look at them as part of the problem, not the solution, and they themselves are the suspects,” Osmeña told Rappler in September 2018.
The former mayor appeared before the quad comm on September 19, accusing Garma of raking in a weekly P1-million payola from illegal gambling lords.
Two other controversial cops served under Sinas at the PRO-7. Police Colonel Lito Patay, who had been linked to death squad killings, replaced Garma at the regional Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG).
Former Mandaluyong police chief Hector Grijaldo, earlier grilled on the murder of Barayuga, commanded the regional mobile force battalion.
Grijaldo almost sailed under the radar until Abang Lingkod Representative Stephen Paduano, a resident of Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, inquired about the whereabouts of Albotra’s other team member, Bolandres.
He had gone back to Negros Island following Calumba’s death, said the police captain.
Sauron’s bloody trail
Paduano perked up and called in Grijaldo to inquire about his unit’s role in Sauron killings. The legislator abruptly cut short his questioning, however, reserving his questions for the next hearing.
Rappler has published several reports on the fallout from Sauron. Non-government organizations like Human Rights Watch, Karapatan, and Amnesty International also linked Sinas to killings and other atrocities as he climbed to the top PNP post.
A 2020 Senate joint committee report urged the executive branch to probe police, Army soldiers, and a local anti-communist vigilante group for human rights violations in Negros Island, where 116 rights defenders were killed from July 2016 to August 27, 2019.
In some cases, multiple killings overnight followed the pattern of tokhang in the capital: family members marched out of homes, heard kin’s pleas for mercy, followed by shots, and the usual “nanlaban” claim as attackers brought out bodies.
In Canlaon City, amidst a 2019 curfew and a red alert, more than 30 armed men barged into the home of a councilor, killing him and then a village official in a nearby community, getting away on five vehicles with no challenge from local authorities.
The killings of lawyers, human rights workers, teachers, peasant leaders, grassroots religious workers, business owners, and even cops prodded the four bishops of Negros Island to order the ringing of church bells in protest.
After the March 4, 2023, killing of Governor Roel Degamo and eight of his followers, more than 60 families of victims appeared during Senate hearings. By then, unresolved killings in Negros Oriental had balooned to 78.
It is time for the quad comm to summon Sinas. They have enough evidence to show how widespread rights violations are often a mark of a crime upsurge. They can no longer ignore the elephant in Cebu’s bloody landscape. – Rappler.com
