MANILA, Philippines – A former youth leader, who went missing last week in Metro Manila, has been found detained in a military camp in Isabela on murder charges, a militant human rights group reported Thursday.

Randy Felix Malayao, 39, was serving as a peace consultant of the communist-led National Democratic Front (NDF) when he disappeared on the night of May 15, Karapatan claimed, citing reports of his family. He was surfaced five days later at Camp Melchor dela Cruz in Gamu, Isabela, bearing signs of torture, it alleged.

(The Inquirer learned that Malayao had been placed in the custody of the Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Ilagan, Isabela.)

The group said Malayao could have been detained for being listed as a coaccused in the 2003 killing of Cagayan Rep. Rodolfo Aguinaldo, a former colonel who had been tagged as among the top henchmen of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.

The New People’s Army (NPA), military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), claimed to have meted the death sentence to Aguinaldo in 2001. The CPP-NPA, which leads the NDF, has been waging an armed insurgency against the government since 1968.

Malayao, a former youth leader, was elected vice president for the Visayas of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines.

Based on his accounts, government agents grabbed him as he was alighting a bus on his way to a relative’s house in Pasig City on May 15.

Earlier reports said Malayao was on board a taxi when he informed his relatives and friends through a text message that he was being followed. But he said he could not find a cab so he took a bus.

Malayao had just gone to dinner with some friends in Ortigas Avenue in Pasig when he was seized. He was shoved inside a vehicle and blindfolded, Karapatan said.

The group alleged that his captors covered his head with a plastic bag and punched him in different parts of the body during the “interrogation.”

Decrying the incident, Karapatan called for the creation of an independent fact-finding team that will look into Malayao’s alleged abduction, torture, illegal arrest and detention.

The team, it said, should be composed of representatives from human rights group, the church, the local government and the Commission on Human Rights.