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By Efren L. Danao, Senior
Reporter
Police investigators should look
into the possible involvement of drugs and even the New People’s
Army (NPA) in the killing of cousins Alfredo “Patty” and
Virgilio “Boyet” Vendivil, the mayor-elect and vice-mayor-elect
of Lupao, Nueva Ecija, an informant told The Manila Times Monday.
The informant, a resident of
Lupao, also believed that the assassination was not carried out by
professional killers.
“The killers are intensely
angry at Patty and Boyet. They are unlikely to be guns-for-hire,”
he said.
He pointed out that the gunmen
shot Boyet shot eight times and Patty, 15 times inside a cockpit in
Barangay Santo Niño, San Jose City, late Friday night. Patty, who
had just won his fourth term as Lupao mayor last May 14, ran the
cockpit.
“No professional killer would
waste that many bullets. Only intense hatred could make a killer
shoot that many times at a target,” the informant said.
The drug issue and the NPA angle,
according to him, bear looking into because the son and namesake of
Alfredo Sr. had earlier been charged with drug pushing. Jun Vendivil
was killed on August 1, 2006, while cleaning his motorcycle in a
barangay in Lupao. The Vendivils were still in mourning when the
elder Vendivil was killed.
The informant said the killers
were obviously after both Patty and Boyet, and not just Patty.
“If the killers were only after
Patty, why was Boyet the first one to be shot?” he asked.
The first shot hit Boyet in the
head, killing him instantly. He was shot seven more times, including
one in the heart.
The informant also noted that the
killing was carried out inside the cockpit where the two were
together.
“Had the killers waited for the
two to leave the cockpit and return to Lupao, they would not have
been able to kill both because the two were riding in separate
vehicles,” he said.
The family of the victims
believed that politics was the main reason for the assassination.
The informant doubted this.
“If politics is the reason, why
did they wait until after the election? What’s more, it takes a
long period to look for killers and to make a surveillance of the
victims. This was obviously planned long before the election,” the
informant said.
Another resident doubted if the
NPA carried out the assassinations.
“The killers wounded seven
other persons who were innocent bystanders. I don’t think the NPA
would do that. The operations seemed to have been carried out with
military precision,” he said.
Lupao had been NPA-infested. Last
year, the Army’s 7th Infantry Division headed by Maj. Gen. Jovito
Palparan made a “laboratory” out of Lupao and undertook an
offensive to flush out NPA members and sympathizers.
Supt. Peter Guibong, the San Jose
City police chief, insisted that the killers were professional
assassins.
He said the gunmen were very
precise, requiring only seconds to carry out the hit.
The attack was also well-planned,
Guibong said. The killers chose San Jose, where the law enforcers
were not apprised of the risk the victims were facing because they
were from another town.
On Monday the police released
sketches of three of the five suspects who, Guibong said, may have
come from out of town.
The suspects were described as
medium built. Two of them were about 40 years old, the other 50
years old, about 5’4" and 5’5".
 --With
Armand M. Galang
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