EDITORIAL - Missing pieces

The word from Chicago yesterday was that former police senior superintendent Cesar Mancao was ready to be extradited and had executed an affidavit on the murders of publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito.

Dacer was being driven to his office in Manila by Corbito on Nov. 24, 2000 when their vehicle was waylaid as they approached the intersection of Zobel Roxas Street and President Osmeña Highway in Manila. It took several months before their remains were unearthed in a shallow grave in Cavite and the remains identified.

Two farmers who told the police that they assisted in the murders said the victims were tortured before being strangled to death and then burned. The two pointed to the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, the elite police group headed by Panfilo Lacson, as the perpetrators of the grisly crime. The team that carried out the crime was supposedly led by Senior Supt. Teofilo Viña, at the time head of the PAOCTF branch in the Visayas. Viña, who denied the story, was shot dead in Cavite in January 2003.

When Joseph Estrada was ousted and a new administration came to power, a member of the PAOCTF in Luzon, Senior Supt. Glenn Dumlao, was arrested and said both Estrada and Lacson might have known about the murders. Both men have repeatedly denied this. Dumlao also identified Mancao and Senior Supt. Michael Ray Aquino as the ones who planned the murders. Aquino and Mancao fled to the United States in July 2001, but were arrested years later in connection with an espionage case.

Twenty-two men, 11 of them policemen, have been indicted for the twin murders. But the motive has not been established and the mastermind has not been identified. There is only speculation, which mainly follows what Dacer’s daughter has told the press: if any harm came to him, Dacer reportedly told his daughter, Lacson would bear the blame.

Even without that story, Lacson will have to explain how a large team from an elite anti-crime task force that he headed became implicated in kidnapping and murder. The families of Dacer and Corbito await justice, and the nation is waiting to get the complete picture in connection with their deaths. Mancao could fill in the missing pieces.