Charges filed vs Cebu City police intel chief

CEBU CITY — The chief of the city police Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau, along with two of his men, was charged with reckless imprudence resulting in homicide for the fatal shooting of a robbery suspect last Tuesday afternoon.

Charged were CIIB chief Paul Labra, PO2 Brazilio Borinaga and PO1 Eric Ybañez. Homicide investigators said the three failed to exercise "extra safety precautionary measures" in escorting robbery suspect Roger Rojo.

The three police officers were escorting Rojo to the supposed hideout of two of his cohorts at Happy Valley here when the 24-year-old native of Ozamis City allegedly managed to unlock his handcuff, then grab a gun from Ybañez and attempted to shoot it out with the lawmen.

The incident triggered a public outcry on suspicion that Rojo was a victim of a rubout. Labra, however, said they shot Rojo in self-defense.

But homicide probers, while ruling out murder, still believe that the three officers could have merely disabled Rojo instead of fatally shooting him.

The complaint against Labra and his two men was supposed to be filed last Wednesday but chief prosecutor Cesar Tajan—langit did not receive it in the absence of a death certificate.

Rojo was arrested last Saturday at a police checkpoint in Punta Princesa. When lawmen were about to frisk him, he took a woman hostage.

He barged into a boarding home and took at least seven more people hostage, holding police at bay for four hours before he finally surrendered. He yielded two guns.

Hours before his death, a woman claiming to be his mother tried to see him while he was in police custody but Rojo reportedly turned her away.

"Go away, I do not know you," Rojo reportedly told the woman in Cebuano, as quoted by Labra himself.

The woman, who identified herself as Violeta, reportedly told Labra that Rojo had been a trouble-maker and left home two years ago.

However, speculations on who the woman really is grew when she did not show up at the autopsy of Rojo’s body. — Freeman News Service