3 ‘rubout’ witnesses branded as scalawags

COTABATO CITY — Scalawags.

This was how the Central Mindanao police director, Senior Superintendent Bartolome Baluyot, described three North Cotabato policemen who have implicated their provincial director in the alleged rubout of three suspected Pentagon members last Feb. 17.

"They are in the order of battle for drug traffickers in the province. They are also being investigated on missing government firearms that got lost while in their custody," an irate Baluyot told radio station dxND in Kidapawan City yesterday.

The three policemen — SPO3 Ricardo Pacete, SPO1 Ricardo Romero and PO1 Christopher Coronado — were fetched last Sunday by police Director Lucas Managuelod from the archbishop’s residence in Kidapawan where they had sought sanctuary since last week.

Managuelod accompanied them to Camp Crame where they would provide details about the alleged rubout.

Pacete, Romero and Coronado claimed having seen how a police team, headed by their provincial director, Senior Superintendent Odelon Ramoneda, shot the three suspected Pentagon members, all Muslims, just meters away from their outpost in the West Patadon district in Matalam, North Cotabato.

They further claimed that Ramoneda’s group merely placed firearms beside the bodies of the three victims, apparently to make it appear that they were killed in a "legitimate" encounter.

Baluyot said the three policemen could have invented the story to divert ongoing investigation into their alleged illegal activities.

Pacete, Romero and Coronado first sought help from the parish priest of Matalam, who, in turn, accompanied them to the archbishop’s residence in Kidapawan.

Baluyot, however, told dxND that he has assigned investigators to validate the allegations of the three policemen and gather statements of residents near the alleged rubout site in West Patadon.