No clues yet on slay try on ‘jueteng lord’

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga - The case of the Sept. 15 shooting of a suspected gambling lord here seems headed nowhere.

"Witnesses have fled, and we have no complainant at all," lamented Superintendent Sonny Cunanan, city police chief.

This, after two vital witnesses, Ariel Trinidad, companion of alleged jueteng lord Melchor Caluag who was shot in the arm, and Caluag’s driver, Pop-eye Dizon, have gone into hiding, apparently fearing for their safety.

Cunanan said that Caluag himself, still confined at St. Luke’s Hospital in Quezon City due to bullet wounds in the abdomen and shoulder, has refused to issue any statement to investigators.

"We cannot pursue the case with neither a complainant nor witnesses. But I intend to personally see Caluag and convince him to (give any) information to help us solve the shooting," he said.

Cunanan told The STAR he intends to talk to Caluag today.

But Senior Superintendent Rodolfo Mendoza, Pampanga police director, said the police would pursue the case despite the disappearance of the witnesses.

He cited reports of an alleged cover-up amid speculations that those behind the slay attempt were Caluag’s rivals in alleged jueteng operations who are influential and known to the police.

Caluag and Trinidad were on their way out of a pizza parlor in Barangay Dolores, where the suspected jueteng lord was elected chairman, when two men, wearing short pants and slippers, frontally shot them.

The gunmen fled aboard a jeep with license plate DWJ-136 which was later found abandoned near the Robinson’s mall not far away.

Cunanan said Caluag and Trinidad were at the pizza parlor to meet with two individuals — both still unnamed — who never showed up, giving rise to suspicions that the rendezvous was a set-up.

Cunanan earlier said that Dizon was the one who told investigators about the supposed meeting. But the police chief changed his story yesterday, saying it was Caluag’s wife who revealed the purported meeting.

He said Dizon disappeared on the day of the shooting.

Cunanan said the jeep’s owner, a certain Jose Millora, claimed that the vehicle was stolen last Sept. 13. But records show that he reported the theft only on Sept. 17, or two days after it was used in the shooting.