Drive vs loose firearms on

BORACAY, Aklan — President Arroyo ordered the Philippine National Police (PNP) yesterday to compile a list of all known hired gunmen as part of a crackdown on loose firearms following the murder of former Pasig City congressman Henry Lanot last Wednesday.

Mrs. Arroyo condemned the murder of Lanot, saying, "I want the authorities to leave no stone unturned in bringing the perpetrators, including the mastermind, to justice."

The President ordered the PNP to "come up with a special order of battle for guns-for-hire and to check the proliferation of loose firearms that allow these heinous killings to be planned and executed."

An order of battle is a list compiled by the government of suspects belonging to a criminal gang or insurgent group who are targetted for arrest.

Mrs. Arroyo also tasked the PNP to check on the proliferation of loose firearms.

Sources at the PNP-Directorate for Intelligence said there were about 130,000 loose firearms monitored in the year 2003 compared to 872,921 licensed firearms the same year.

A ranking police official said the number of "loose" firearms may have increased even after the government granted an amnesty to illegal firearms holders in order to get them to register their weapons.

The same official said he is not ruling out the possibility that the number of "loose" firearms had increased, attributing it to smuggling activities in the country’s unguarded coastlines.

Lanot was shot in the head on Wednesday by an unidentified man while he was having lunch with friends at a restaurant in Pasig City.

Mrs. Arroyo warned that violence has no place in a democratic society "and we shall strike hard against those who take the law into their own hands."

The President issued the warning while paying a visit here to inaugurate various private investment projects in the island resort, where the gruesome killings of three foreigners and a Filipino in May last year remain unsolved.

The Lanot assassination was only one of many deadly attacks widely blamed on "guns for hire" or hired killers who work for politicians, crooked businessmen or criminal enterprises.

Many of the victims have been left-wing figures, and the ranks of their dead grew Thursday when police and union officials claimed a labor leader had been shot dead in an ambush in Bacolod.

Edwin Bargamento, auditor of the National Federation of Sugar Workers, was attacked by motorcycle-riding gunmen on his way home last Wednesday.

Bargamento had just taken part in a street protest by the union in support of its bid for wage increases for sugar mill and plantation workers, a police report said.

John Milton Lozande, the union chairman, claimed the killing was similar to the murders of left-wing activists around the country.

At least two dozen members of Bayan Muna, a fringe leftist political party that has been accused by the military of ties to communist guerrillas, have been assassinated over the past two years, according to its party leaders.

Lozande accused the government of being behind the murders.

"We see the hand of the military in this. This is clearly part of the ongoing campaign of terror and repression by the Arroyo regime against critics of its corruption and abuses," Lozande alleged.

Human rights activists previously blamed a "culture of impunity" that tolerates the use of death squads to eliminate criminals, where policemen are rewarded if they "permanently neutralize" crooks and where activists, lawyers, political and trade union officials are frequently gunned down by hired goons.

Interior Secretary Angelo Reyes denied claims that the government condones such violence. – With Cecille Suerte Felipe, AFP