SHARIFF AGUAK, MAGUINDANAO ? Star-struck policemen forgot they were guarding weapons seized from massacre suspects when a celebrity TV news anchor arrived and picked up a machine gun to pose as Rambo.

?It?s Julius Babao!,? about six policemen in the Maguindanao capital gushed, neglecting the guns in their rush for souvenir pictures.

As the government tries to build a case against a powerful Ampatuan political clan accused of massacring 57 people on Nov. 23, criticism is growing about its competence in collecting and preserving evidence.

The case partly rests on the recovery of weapons that could have been used in the killings, to be cross-checked with shell casings recovered from the crime scene and bullets pulled out of the victims? bodies.

Policemen fawning over high-profile figures such as Babao appear to be not the only pitfall.

Guns haphazardly stacked

Journalists have witnessed guns stacked haphazardly in an unsecured place while awaiting ballistics tests, and crime scene investigators using backhoes to pull out the dead from mass graves.

On one occasion soldiers using landmine probes unearthed a cache of M-16 assault rifles wrapped inside sacks behind the government house in Ampatuan, near the massacre site.

Police began pulling the guns out with their bare hands and laying them side by side on the ground as television crews arrived.

They were stopped by their outraged commander.

?You?ll get your prints all over them,? Army Lt. Col. Edgardo de Leon yelled. ?Do you want to be charged with murder as well??

Juan Pablo Baraybar, a Peruvian forensic anthropologist who was an expert witness in the Rwanda and Yugoslavia genocide trials, revisited the crime scene for the Commission on Human Rights and concluded that investigators? work was sloppy.

Police missed some casings

Baraybar said grieving relatives had been allowed on to the massacre site immediately afterward, potentially contaminating the crime scene.

Baraybar said his team recovered more than 30 shell casings and four slugs apparently missed by the police investigators.

But the chief of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group said authorities had built up a solid case.

?We have strong evidence against our suspects,? said Senior Supt. Ericson Velasquez.

?You should also consider the available personnel of our scene-of-the-crime operatives ? and the sheer magnitude of the case,? he said. ?There are human limitations.?