PRO-12 seeking closure to killings of kagawads

COTABATO CITY - The Police Regional Office-12 has sought the help of local government units in solving the two separate gun attacks in just six days in two towns in Cotabato province that left two newly-elected barangay councilors dead.

Edmar Pineda Perero, elected kagawad of Barangay Dolores in Antipas town last October 30, was driving his tricycle on his way home from somewhere in the municipality when gunmen along the route attacked, killing him on the spot.

Brig. Gen. Jimili L. Macaraeg, director of PRO-12, said Wednesday that he has ordered Cotabato’s provincial police director, Col. Harold S. Ramos, to look into assertions that the atrocity was related to Perero’s election as kagawad in their barangay during Monday’s synchronized barangay and Sangguniang elections.

“We will do our best to solve his brutal death in the hands of his attackers,” Macaraeg said.

Perero was killed after an elected kagawad in Barangay Poblacion 3 in Midsayap town in Cotabato, Suharto Mascud Antillino, was shot dead on Wednesday last week by a lone attacker in a daytime attack in the municipality.

Witnesses and relatives of Antillino, elected as kagawad, or councilman in Barangay Poblacion 3 in Midsayap, had confirmed to investigators in the Midsayap Municipal Police Station that his killer was his own cousin, whose name local authorities withheld, meantime, while efforts to locate him are still underway.

Antillino, proclaimed kagawad-elect on October 31 by municipal personnel of the Commission on Elections, was first approached by the suspect, overheard talking to him in the Maguindanaon vernacular, before gunshots reverberated through the scene.

The suspect had escaped before responding policemen and barangay leaders had reached the spot where he was killed. 

“Our investigators just need time to wind up with their separate ongoing investigation on the murder of Kagawad Perero and Kagawad Antillano,” Macaraeg said.