A village council member was beheaded in the province of Albay by lawless elements, who were believed to be members of the communist rebel, New People’s Army (NPA), according to a military spokesman.

Maj. Angelo Guzman, spokesman of the Ninth Infantry Division, identified on Monday the victim as Ely Oguis, a village councilman of Brgy. Kabalungan, Guinobatan in Albay.

Guzman said that they were still determining the exact time of the murder but pointed out that prior to the incident at about 11 p.m. on Sunday, an undetermined number of leftist rebels fired at the Army’s Peace and Development Team detachment at the said barangay.

Guzman expressed belief that the shooting incident was a decoy so that government troops would remain at their detachment and then executed their plan to behead the village councilman.

“They shot the detachment from a distance. We have an SOP [standard operating procedure] to hold the line in cases like this,” he explained.

He explained that while the manner of killing was rather unusual to blame to the NPAs, it remains possible, saying that the rebels have already discarded their ideology and were more on criminal activities.

It is not far-fetched, he added, that the NPAs who fired at the Army detachment were the same group who killed Oguis, who was not only beheaded but was also shot six times in different parts of his body.

“We believe [that it was the same group of NPA]. I have talked to the battalion commander and the brigade commander and that’s what they both said,” Guzman cited adding that the victim had also reported to government authorities that the rebels were trying to extort money from him but refused to yield to their demand.

Oguis, he said, is a businessman and owns vast tracts of land in the barangay.