Death squad blamed for GenSan slays

GENERAL SANTOS CITY — Local residents have expressed mixed feelings over the emergence of a death squad here blamed for a string of killings.

The death squad’s supposed latest victim, 40-year-old businessman Rolando de las Marias, was gunned down last Thursday by two motorcycle-riding men while on his way home from a public school, some 200 meters away from his house.

De las Marias was a scion of prominent labor leader Calixto de las Marias.

Chief Inspector Allan Tanato, chief of the Pendatun police station, said investigation hinted that the killing of the young De las Marias might have something to do with illegal drugs.

Tanato said the slain businessman was walking on Quezon Avenue across his house at about 12:50 p.m. when one of the suspects shot him once in the head from behind.

Several weeks ago, former police major Amil Abtahi was waylaid by three gunmen aboard a motorcycle.

Abtahi, dismissed from the police service due to his alleged links with the extremist Abu Sayyaf, was said to have been killed also by the same vigilante group because of his alleged involvement in the illicit drug trade. His family had denied this.

Before Abtahi’s death, City Hall security officer Jojo Parangan was killed in a broad daylight attack supposedly by the death squad near the Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage Parish Church, some 100 meters away from City Hall.

Last Saturday, an unidentified balot vendor, suspected of peddling shabu to his customers, was fatally shot in the head by two motorcycle-riding men in Barangay Bula.

"It’s better that the death squad exists now to wipe out people who are involved in drugs because they are just a menace to our community," Bong Reblando, president of the Media Association of General Santos and correspondent of the Manila Bulletin, said in the local dialect.

But former Mayor Rosalita Nuñez has reiterated his call to the vigilante group and law enforcers not to put the law in their hands and respect due process.

"If the suspected pushers have, indeed, committed such crimes and (there is) substantial evidence (against them), then we have to charge them in court and allow them to answer the accusations," Nuñez said.

This, as she assailed the anti-narcotics agents who killed his nephew during an alleged rubout in his house in Barangay Fatima last April.

Some quarters noted that the killings took place since Superintendent Efren Alquisar assumed as director of the Central Mindanao narcotics command based here last month.