Batangas town vice mayor dies 3 days after attack

Three days after he was shot three times by an unidentified man at a mall in Pasay City, Vice Mayor Florencio Manimtim Jr. of Talisay town in Batangas died early Friday at the hospital.

Doctors of San Juan de Dios Hospital pronounced Manimtim dead at 3:22 a.m.

Police investigators tried to speak with the local official on Sunday afternoon but were told that his medical condition had remained unstable and that he was confined at the hospital’s intensive care unit, according to Senior Supt. Melchor Reyes, Pasay police chief.

Manimtim was shot three times on Thursday while he was waiting for his van in front of SM Mall of Asia’s Hypermart on  Sunset Avenue and Harbour Drive. The assailant fled on a red motorcycle driven by a cohort.

Some members of the vice mayor’s family said the attack could have been politically motivated but would not identify any possible mastermind in their affidavits, according to a source who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

Manimtim, who had served three terms as mayor of Talisay,  won the vice mayoral race by a margin of merely three votes over his closest rival. His electoral victory, however, is the subject of a protest filed before the court in Tanauan City in Batangas.

On Aug. 7, 2010, the vice mayor was attending his father’s interment at the Talisay municipal cemetery in Barangay Poblacion when he was shot and wounded in the head by one of two assailants. His bodyguard, Guillermo Macaraig, 57, was killed.

Chief Insp. Joey Goforth, head of the Pasay police investigation division, had raised the possibility that the same assailants carried out Thursday’s mall attack.

Following Manimtim’s death, Reyes activated Task Force Talisay to conduct a thorough investigation. Aside from close coordination with the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Batangas, he said footage taken by closed-circuit television cameras of the attack would be studied further.