EDITORIAL - Changing testimony

Two years after walking out of his detention cell in the National Bureau of Investigation, former police senior superintendent Cezar Mancao surfaced over the weekend, with a new version of his story about the execution of publicist Salvador Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito.

Mancao said he would apologize to Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada and former senator Panfilo Lacson for linking them to the grisly killings. Mancao, who turned state witness after being arrested in the United States and deported, claimed Estrada, during his presidency in 2000, had wanted Dacer eliminated, with Corbito as collateral damage. Lacson was Estrada’s national police chief at the time and concurrent head of the special police task force whose key members were implicated in the twin murders.

The motive for the gangland-style execution remains unclear. Mancao’s surfacing merely reminds the nation that more than 14 years after Dacer and Corbito were waylaid by a team from the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, the crime is still waiting for a conclusive solution, and the trial of the accused is crawling along. Several suspects and key witnesses have been killed, and the nation is no closer to unearthing the mastermind.

As in other cases, the nation must content itself with rumors and conjectures. Dacer was supposed to have damning documents that he was preparing to make public against certain influential personalities when he was waylaid on his way to work on Nov. 24, 2000 in Makati. Corbito, being an eyewitness, was also snatched and had to be permanently silenced.

Mancao has promised to tell the whole truth this time, but the credibility of any witness who keeps changing his story will always be suspect. The government will have to rely on other testimonies and solid pieces of evidence to solve this crime and give justice to the murder victims.