Spate of Luzon hijackings related to 2004 elections?

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga — Could the rise in hijackings of cargo trucks in Central and Northern Luzon be related to next year’s elections?

Police are looking into this and other possibilities — such as the involvement of communist rebels and a big criminal syndicate — even as they have beefed up coordination with law enforcers in three regions and the presence of mobile units along the highways.

Apart from personal profit, Senior Superintendent Rodolfo Mendoza, Pampanga’s police director, believes the hijackers are out to tarnish the image of the police, procure funds to buy firearms or raise campaign money for certain politicians.

Mendoza, however, suspects that a big syndicate could be behind the highway robberies, citing reports that the hijackers wore police uniforms.

The hijackers, he added, usually pretend to be traffic enforcers with their vehicles equipped with sirens and beacons. They flag down cargo trucks, announce the heist, tie up the drivers and their helpers who they later dump elsewhere, and commandeer the trucks.

He could not readily give figures on the number of recent hijackings, but admitted that they have escalated in this province as well as in Tarlac, Bulacan and Pangasinan.

Mendoza observed that there was also a rash of hijackings prior to the 2001 elections.

In the latest incident, hijackers preyed on a cargo truck loaded with 350 sacks of refined sugar worth P500,000 along the MacArthur Highway in Barangay Saguing this city.

According to Mendoza, communist rebels can also be involved, saying they similarly want to discredit the police and are known to support certain candidates during elections.