2 cops in crusader’s slay acquitted

SAN PEDRO CITY, Laguna, Philippines — A Manila trial court acquitted the two police officers charged in the murder of anticrime crusader Zenaida Luz in Oriental Min¬doro.

The 30-page resolution by Judge Daniel Villanueva of the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 49 acquitted former Capt. Magdalino Pimentel Jr. and Lt. Markson Almeranez after the prosecution failed to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Out on bail

Pimentel and Almeranez are both out on bail since 2017.

Advocacy group Citizens Crime Watch (CCW), which called it “the first, clear case of EJK (extrajudicial killing)” during President Rodrigo Duterte’s watch, vowed to appeal the Jan. 30 ruling.

“We are not losing hope. We will file a motion (appeal) even if it means going up the Supreme Court,” the group’s president, Diego Magpantay, said in a phone interview on Sunday.

A frustrated Perlita Alvarez, Luz’s sister, said, “We leave it up to God. Only He could avenge us and give justice.”

Luz, 51, a CCW officer in Oriental Mindoro, was gunned down in front of her home at Barangay Maligaya in Gloria town on Oct. 9, 2016.

Testimonies

A team of police officers, which happened to be in the vicinity, caught up with the two alleged gunmen — one wearing a balaclava while the other, a wo¬man’s wig — supposedly on the run from the crime scene.

The suspects, who rode in tandem on a motorcycle co¬lored red and white, turned out to be Pimentel, who was formerly assigned to Oriental Mindoro’s Provincial Public Safety Company, and Almeranez.

The prosecution presented the testimonies of the arresting police officers, a civilian witness, and of coaccused Tyrone Fabella, in a two-year proceeding that involved the transfer of the case from Mindoro to Manila.

Fabella, who claimed to be an “asset” of Pimentel, testified that he and Pimentel’s nephew, Silvester Pimentel, rode in tandem on another motorcycle, colored black.

‘Contradictions’

According to Fabella, Pimentel shot Luz from a distance of 8.5 meters with a .45-caliber gun. The weapon was swapped with a .38-caliber gun shortly after the murder, Fabella said.

“The essential testimonies of alleged principal civilian witness … and touted star witness and voluntary coaccused Tyrone Fabella not only contradict each other on the supposed perpetrator-gunman, they directly impeach each other’s alleged eyewitness account of the purported actual murder,” Villanueva’s ruling read.

‘Kind of killing’

One of the contradictions noted by the court was the civilian witness’ testimony saying that the suspect who shot Luz was riding the black motorcycle, not the red-white motorcycle.

On Fabella’s testimony, the court “wondered” what his real role was, other than to “observe” and switch the guns as Fabella claimed.

The ruling read: “In this kind of specially premeditated or planned killing, even if the plan was spur of the moment… isn’t it in such kind of killing the less witness there are the better?”

It added: “In the case at bar, the prosecution failed to prove the participation of the accused in the commission of the offense. The prosecution must rely on the strength of its own evidence, and not anchor its success upon the weakness of the evidence of the accused.”