'Dagsa murder not about revenge'

MANILA, Philippines –  The gunman in the New Year’s Day murder of a Caloocan City councilman is only part of an organized group behind the crime, police said yesterday.

Caloocan City police chief Senior Superintendent Jude Santos said Arnel Buenaflor, 26, who was accidentally caught on camera aiming a gun by slain Barangay 35 councilman Reynaldo Dagsa, is a “paid assassin” and did not shoot the victim out of revenge.

“We have discovered incriminating text messages on Arnel’s cell phone showing that the killing of councilman Dagsa was planned not only by him and there was money involved,” Santos told The STAR.

Buenaflor and his girlfriend Loraine Castro, 26, were arrested in Barangay Kalabasa in Aurora, Isabela at around 10 p.m. Thursday. They arrived in Caloocan City police station accompanied by a team led by Chief Inspector Rodrigo Soriano at about 4 a.m. yesterday.

In one of the text messages, Buenaflor’s supposed “handler” gave him instructions to hide in the province upon learning th

at Michael Rollon, 27, one of Buenaflor’s alleged lookouts in the murder, was already arrested.

Before Rollon’s arrest, the handler directed his henchmen where to get the money and instructed them to have Buenaflor admit on video that he acted alone in killing Dagsa and have the video uploaded on the Internet so their other cohorts would not be implicated.

Soriano said they discovered that Buenaflor bought a .9mm pistol from a suspected gun dealer last December for only P4,000 but sold the gun back for P3,000 to the same person after Dagsa’s killing.

Interviewed in his cell, Buenaflor insisted that he wanted revenge after the councilman and his group – Allan, Ike and Mar – allegedly attempted to kill him in November last year. He showed The STAR a scar on the right side of his head he claimed was caused by a bullet from Dagsa’s gun.

He said that he did not plan to kill Dagsa but it happened that he and Rollon chanced upon the victim outside his house while taking pictures of his family on the New Year’s Eve.

But Santos said Buenaflor’s claim is “just a cover-up for a bigger scenario. There are other people involved and other motives behind.”

“There was no police record about his claim but instead it’s he who has a pending attempted murder case in our local court,” Santos said.

At least two other suspects in Dagsa’s killing – Rollon’s live-in partner, Gina Inderes, and Frederick Sales – were arrested earlier while Rommel Oliva and Francis Bronjal remain at large.

Soriano said they hunted down the suspects in their possible hiding places in Maypajo, Castro’s place in Quezon City, and Bulacan until on Jan. 5, they received a call from their counterparts in Isabela that somebody, who happened to be a passenger of a bus where Buenaflor and Castro rode got the gunman’s cell phone that accidentally fell from his pocket and turned it over to the police.

It led the police to a boarding house in Isabela where Buenaflor and Castro were hiding.