Cotabato residents seek relief of ‘soft’ Cotabato police head

Beleaguered residents of North Cotabato’s Kabacan town have called for the immediate relief of their provincial police director for hesitating to arrest their mayor and her husband, implicated in the killing last week of supporter of a rival political quarter and charged of violating the barangay elections gun ban.

North Cotabato Gov. Emmanuel Piñol, chairman of the Provincial Peace and Order Council, ordered on Thursday the arrest of Mayor Luzviminda Tan and her spouse, Jojo Tan, but the provincial police director, Senior Supt. Odelon Ramoneda, balked from carrying out his order after seeing that the couple were surrounded by lawyers.

"Medyo nag-alangan nang makitang merong mga abogadong mga nakapalibot sa kanila," Piñol told Catholic station dxMS in Cotabato City yesterday.

Piñol said he has personally requested the office of the National Bureau of Investigation in Region 12 to intervene and conduct a separate probe on the alleged killing by Tan’s husband of Rico Sumatra, a supporter of former Kabacan Mayor Wilfredo Bataga, inside the town’s municipal government compound last Tuesday.

Police probers sent by Piñol to investigate the incident have seized a .38 pistol and a caliber .40 S&W handgun from Tan and her husband, respectively, in a surprise inspection when they invited the couple at the provincial police headquarters in Kidapawan City for questioning a day after the killing.

The firearms, according to Piñol, were not exempted from the gun ban imposed by the Commission on Elections.

Witnesses have tagged Tan’s husband, a grains trader, as the one who approached Sumatra and opened fire during a commotion inside the municipal grounds, triggered by an altercation between the mayor’s group and the supporters of Bataga.