4 held for PLEB head’s slay

BALUNGAO, Pangasinan — Combined elements of the municipal police and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) arrested yesterday four suspects in the killing of the chairman of the local People’s Law Enforcement Board (PLEB) and the wounding of his wife Wednesday night.

Senior Inspector Jeff Fanged, Balungao police chief, told The STAR that the joint police-NBI team nabbed the four suspects — Roger Lloren, Joseph Palpalatoc, Amboy Castillo and Ross Alejandro — in operations in Barangay San Aurelio II here from Sunday afternoon to dawn yesterday.

Fanged said charges of murder and frustrated murder were to be filed against the suspects with the regional trial court in Rosales town yesterday.

Lawyer Carlo Magno Uminga, 48, who was himself a former NBI agent, died from multiple gunshot wounds, while his wife, Rosa Isabel, 55, was hit in the buttocks.

The gunmen wore ski masks when they attacked the couple who were sleeping inside their farmhouse in Barangay Angayan Sur at about 9 p.m. last Wednesday.

Police found 43 empty 5.56 mm shells and six empty shells from a US Carbine at the crime scene.

Fanged said Lloren, caretaker of the Uminga couple’s farm, and Alejandro were subjected to paraffin tests, but the police crime laboratory in Urdaneta City has yet to release the results.

Lloren had implicated Palpalatoc, who, in turn, admitted that the former asked him to hide the guns used in the attack.

The police, indeed, found the firearms in the place that Palpalatoc had identified. The guns will be subjected to ballistic tests.

Palpalatoc later implicated Castillo and Alejandro, whom he tagged as the alleged mastermind. — With Evelyn Macairan