Locals to GMA: Replace police to solve killings

COTABATO CITY — Local sectors yesterday appealed to President Arroyo to replace with a "more active unit" the local police and send in the Marines to help neutralize "untouchable" guns-for-hire, whose latest victim is a popular Muslim judge.

Local leaders are certain the brutal murder here last Saturday of Judge Sahara Silongan, of the Regional Trial Court Branch 15, will just be an addition to the list of dozens of still unsolved high-profile crimes that have spurred criticisms of the city police.

Silongan was on his way home driving his car when motorcycle-riding gunmen overtook his vehicle and attacked him with caliber .45 pistols in a busy thoroughfare not far away from two police precincts.

Silongan, who was city administrator during the late 90s, died while being rushed to a hospital.

The oft-criticized city police, under Senior Superintendent Peraco Macacua, still has no clue on the exact identities of the suspects and the real motive for Silongan’s murder.

Silongan’s wife was slightly wounded in the chest when caliber .45 slugs ricocheted inside their car as the killers pumped bullets into her husband’s body.

Silongan was the second popular Muslim lawyer killed here in two months. His murder was preceded by the fatal ambush in a busy spot here of accountant lawyer Arnel Datukun, then manager of the World Bank-assisted Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Social Fund Project.

Datukun was a former member of the City Council and dean of the College of Law of the Notre Dame University, Central Mindanao’s biggest Catholic school.

The solicitor-general of ARMM, lawyer Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi, survived a bomb attack while on her way home from a party about a month before Datukun was ambushed and killed in a busy intersection here by gunmen wearing Army uniforms.

Guiani-Sayadi, a champion pistol shooter, has since been wearing flak jacket and carries a high-capacity .45 Para-Ordnance pistol as protection.

The attempt on Guiani-Sayadi’s life came about two months after armed men sprayed with assault rifles the vehicle of Kahal Kedtag, Maguindanao’s provincial environment and natural resources officer, near the entrance to the 32-hectare ARMM compound here.

Kedtag, who was wounded in the attack, has voluntarily asked a temporary relief from his post due to mounting threats on his life.

The local police, until now, has not solved the murders here of the assistant director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Region 12, the officer-in-charge of the Regional office here of the Department of Transportation and Communications, and several barangay chairmen in a seemingly unending trail of bloodshed.

"The situation now is very alarming. Something has to be done right away," a barangay official, who asked not to be identified, told The Star.