Police fail to arrest 2 Esperat slay suspects

COTABATO CITY – Police tried but failed to serve the warrants for the arrest of two ranking officials of the Department of Agriculture in Central Mindanao who were implicated in the 2005 killing of a newspaper columnist in Sultan Kudarat.

Senior Superintendent Willie Dangane, city police chief, said DA officials, Hadji Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, finance chief and accountant for Region 12, respectively, could have left after learning that a Tacurong City court had issued new warrants for their arrest in connection with the murder of Marlene Esperat.

“They are no longer here,” Dangane told reporters.

A former staffer of the DA-Region 12’s agricultural laboratory, Esperat revealed alleged fund anomalies involving the two officials in her columns in Midland Review, a weekly newspaper circulating in Sultan Kudarat.

She was gunned down on Maundy Thursday in 2005 in front of her children in their residence in Tacurong City by three men who escaped on board motorcycles.

Judge Melencio Guevarra of the Tacurong City regional trial court issued the new arrest warrants for Montañer and Sabay after the Department of Justice ordered them prosecuted again following an extensive review of the Esperat murder case.  

Three other suspects – Gerry Cabagay, Randy Grecia and Estanislao Bismanos – were earlier sentenced to life imprisonment.

A local court earlier had cleared Montañer and Sabay due to lack of evidence, but the DOJ ordered them arrested again after an extensive review on the request of Esperat’s family and various cause-oriented groups and non-government organizations.