Reward proposed in search for Bentain

Authorities are mulling a cash reward for anyone who can find a drum of concrete purportedly containing the corpse of missing casino worker Edgar Bentain.

Pampanga police chief Senior Superintendent Is-mael Rafanan told The STAR he would ask the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), which is spearheading the search for the drum, to offer the reward.

Bacolor Mayor Romeo Dungca has also urged the ISAFP to consider offering a cash reward to speed up the search for the drum in the lahar-laden Pasig-Potrero River in Barangay Calantian in that town.

Bentain was believed responsible for the leak to the media of video footage taken from a closed-circuit television at the Heritage Hotel casino. The video showed then presidential candidate Joseph Estrada playing high-stakes baccarat with suspected gambling lord Charlie "Atong" Ang sometime before the May 1998 elections.

He went missing since Jan. 16, 1999 after his tour of duty at the casino.

Angelo "Ador" Manaway, who claimed he was a former civilian agent of the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) headed by then Philippine National Police chief Panfilo Lacson, Estrada’s most trusted police official, implicated Lacson and other ranking officials of the task force to the abduction and murder of Bentain.

Manaway alleged that PAOCTF agents placed Bentain in a drum with cement mixture which was later tossed into a hole of the megadike at the Pasig-Potrero River.

Dungca said the drum might have been washed further downstream toward the Guagua-Pasac River which empties into Manila Bay, or to the Palaman-San Francisco River in Minalin, Pampanga. Both waterways were heavily silted with volcanic debris from Mt. Pinatubo.

Rafanan and Dungca are optimistic that many people would volunteer to look for the drum considering that money is hard to come by nowadays.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself Equal Justice for All Movement which launched "Justice for Edgar Movement" said it would press charges against the PAOCTF officers and men cited by Manaway even if Bentain’s body remains unrecovered.

"We don’t really need to recover Edgar’s body to have a case against the perpetrators for as long as there are other credible evidence to corroborate Ador’s revelations," the group’s leader, Leonardo de Vera, said.

Search for the "Bentain drum" was focused in Calantian after a witness, Julie Lacanlale, told ISAFP agents she had spotted a drum in the area in 1999.

The agents have been using payloaders and backhoes for the search even as local officials warned that the operations could undermine the strength of the megadike, built in mid-90s to protect the entire province of Pampanga from rampaging lahar flows that cascaded down the slopes of Mt. Pinatubo during heavy rains.