EDITORIAL - Allowed to escape?

Members of the Maguindanao police, according to reports, were among those who stood guard along the narrow road leading to the site of the massacre of 57 people in November last year. Military officers, alerted about the carnage, complained that they could not get in touch with the local police. Yet the provincial police chief at the time, Superintendent Piang Adam, has not been indicted for the grisly murders. Worse, Adam, who is suspected of providing some of the weapons used in the massacre, escaped from the Sultan Kudarat provincial jail earlier this week.

Adam had been arrested for illegal possession of firearms, explosives and ammunition. He also faces charges for fabricating a report stating that 104 high-powered guns had been destroyed in a fire that razed the police armory in Shariff Aguak in 2008. Some of the guns were recovered during police raids on properties owned by the Ampatuan clan following the Nov. 23 massacre. According to reports, Adam could provide testimony leading to the mastermind of the mass murder. He was a high-value inmate who should have been placed under heavy guard around the clock.

Though clan patriarch Andal Ampatuan Sr. and his son, Andal Jr., are being held without bail for multiple murder and rebellion, several clan members continue to occupy government positions throughout the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. But Adam had better connections: the provincial police chief of Sultan Kudarat, Senior Superintendent Suharto Teng Tocao, is his cousin, and so is his jail custodian, Taha Kadalum. Piang Adam appears to have been a jailbird just waiting for a go-signal to walk away from his detention cell.

Was this done deliberately? Authorities must uncover the truth, and punish anyone found to have allowed Adam to escape. At the same time, authorities must see to it that other men linked to the massacre remain in custody. Estimates of the number of men who participated in the massacre – as triggermen, guards or officials who did not lift a finger to stop it – range from a few hundred to over a thousand. Most of the suspects were members of the paramilitary Civilian Volunteer Organizations. The rest were cops, who could not have participated in that atrocity without the knowledge of their provincial commander at the time. Adam has a story to tell, and authorities must see to it that he lives to tell it.

First, he must be found.