Personal issue eyed in CDRRMO officer’s murder
Local News • 06:45 AM Thu Mar 7, 2024
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By:
John Felix Unson
Photo by Mark Tayco/DXMS
COTABATO CITY - Relatives and friends of the slain operations chief of the city’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Jose Raymond Marquez, are certain his death in the hands of gunmen has nothing to do with his work.
His cousins and other relatives and even his siblings abroad had told selected reporters that it was something related to his personal life and that his killers could be hired by someone harboring a grudge against him.
Marquez was more known as Choco. He was grandson of a popular Oblate priest, the late Fr. Jose Ante, who had served as president of the Notre Dame University here, Central Mindanao largest Catholic school.
His mother, Soledad, arrived from the United States on Tuesday via Davao City.
The siblings and parents of Marquez had asked the Cotabato City Police Office to look deeply into his saddening fate in the hands of killers.
Col. Querubin Manalang, Jr., director of the Cotabato City police, said Marquez was on his way home on a motorcycle when he was attacked near a gasoline station at the intersection of the Sinsuat Avenue and Luna Street here.
His attackers, armed with .45 caliber pistols, immediately escaped using getaway motorcycles, according to witnesses.
"Police investigators found at least three empty shells of .45 caliber ammunition in the crime scene," Manalang said.
The gun attack that resulted in the death of Marquez was preceded by the near fatal ambush here on August 14, 2023 of the chief of the city government's general services office, Pedro Tato, Jr., that left his driver, Dandy Anonat, also wounded.
The gunmen behind the atrocity that left Tato and Anonat wounded were also armed with .45 caliber pistols.
The duo was ambushed at a stretch of thoroughfare along the fenced compound here of the Cotabato Regional Medical Center. The local police tried its best, but failed to put a closure to the incident.
Cotabato City Mayor Mohammad Ali Matabalao, a first-termer mayor who is presiding chairperson of Cotabato City's multi-sector peace and order council, has condemned Friday's murder of Marquez and urged the local police to identify his killers for prosecution.