Metro Manila’s top police official said on Sunday that an investigation was underway to determine who was behind the waiver that relatives of victims of extrajudicial killings (EJK) in Caloocan City were allegedly being asked to sign.
In an interview with the Inquirer, Chief Supt. Guillermo Eleazar, National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) director, belied the existence of such a document.
“We will investigate. We don’t know what’s the motive behind it or who created it. The chief of the Caloocan police and the chief of the Philippine National Police have already said the waiver is not real,” Eleazar said on Sunday.
Last to know
According to him, the police learned about the alleged waiver after posts about it on social media went viral.
According to the posts, men in civilian clothes were behind the distribution of the single-page waiver written in Filipino.
The document has the heading “Sinumpaang Salaysay (Waiver)” and Republika ng Pilipinas (Republic of the Philippines), Lungsod ng Kalookan (Caloocan City) printed on the left. It stated that the signatory was no longer interested in having the police investigate the killing of a kin.
“We no longer want to remember what happened to our relative. Instead, we want to recall the time we spent with [him] when [he] was still alive and we are leaving everything all up to God,” it read.
Eleazar said that Senior Supt. Resty Arcangel, Caloocan police, texted him last week to explain that he learned about the alleged waiver through a reporter.
“I told [the reporter] that I have no knowledge about it and I have not even seen one. I do not know the motive of the allegation… but [it] is contrary to our desire for the complainant to pursue the case because we also want to solve those cases,” Arcangel told Eleazar.
Police persuasion
“If, however, the complainant is no longer interested to pursue the case for whatever… reason that is beyond our control, definitely we [are] still going to convince them to cooperate especially when we already have the suspects. As to the case of the alleged waiver, we are going to investigate that, [too],” Arcangel added.