‘Remains in drum not my brother Edgar’s’

LUBAO, Pampanga — "This is not my brother."

This was the reaction of a brother of missing casino employee Edgar Bentain after seeing skeletal remains exhumed from a public cemetery in Barangay Sto. Tomas here yesterday.

Bentain’s younger brother Edcel accompanied the authorities who exhumed the skeleton to determine if it was the casino employee’s who was allegedly abducted by officials of the defunct Presidential Anti- Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) on Jan. 16, 1999.

The skeleton belonged to a man of about the same height and build as the missing Bentain but the skeleton lacked a jaw which may have helped in identifying the remains.

Edcel had earlier said he could identify his brother’s remains because Edgar had a jaw operation where a metal brace was implanted in his jaw.

But despite the absence of a jawbone, Edcel said in Filipino that the skeleton was not that of his brother.

National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) supervising agent Narciso Peña said the skeleton exhumed at the Lubao cemetery was brought to the NBI laboratory in Manila for forensic examination.

"We will not stop our investigation because there are many angles that had been uncovered unwittingly in our probe," Peña said.

Peña noted the authorities have a record of "drum murders" in Bulacan where some 10 murder victims were placed inside drums.

Chief NBI chemist Ydabel Pagulayan said they can readily father samples from the sleleton and compare them with samples submitted by Bentain’s relatives to verify if the skeleton was Bentain’s.

The search for Edgar’s remains was prompted by the claim of Angelo Mawanay, alias "Ador," allegedly a former PAOCTF civilian agent, that Edgar was sealed with cement inside a green drum and later buried along the Pasig-Potrero River in Barangay Cabetican in Bacolor town.

The Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), which has had jurisdiction of Mawanay over the past two weeks, has been digging up large areas at the anti-lahar megadike in Cabetican but the diggings so far have yielded nothing.

Some local officials suggested that a cash reward be given to whoever finds Bentain’s remains which, they said, could have already been washed down the lower reaches of the Pasig-Potrero River.

While the ISAFP was making the search, residents said they had also found a body inside a drum a few years ago but records showed that the body was found in 1997, or two years before Bentain’s disappearance, and re-buried at the Lubao cemetery.

Probers, however, felt a need to exhume the remains since it was possible, they said, that the records were tampered to mislead investigators.

A certain Bong Manabat, caretaker of the Sto. Tomas cemetery, said he was the one who buried the body in the crypt but claimed the body was no longer in a drum when it was turned over to him for burial.

Mawanay claimed that he was with PAOCTF officials Senior Superintendents Michael Ray Aquino and Cesar Mancao when they abducted Bentain as he was stepping out the Grand Boulevard (formerly Silahis) Hotel sometime in January 1999.

Mawanay claimed they were about to bring Bentain to Pampanga when they stopped along the way and received some money from Jude Estrada, a son of jailed former President Joseph Estrada.

The next time he saw Bentain, Mawanay said the still-living casino employee was in a drum filled with cement up to his neck and was being berated by Aquino as a "meddler."

Bentain, a closed-circuit operator of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., supposedly gained the ire of the PAOCTF officials after he leaked a videotape showing then-presidential candidate Estrada playing baccarat at the VIP pit of the Pagcor casino at the Heritage Hotel. — With Ric Sapnu