Two pedicab drivers abducted, raped and strangled to death a 7-year-old girl inside their friend’s rented room in Manila after reading a pornographic tabloid.
Suspects and Sigue-Sigue Sputnik gang members Cecilio Bacolo Jr., 19, of Balic-Balic, Sampaloc; and Roderick Soliveres, 28, of 7th Street in Paco, were arrested late Friday night several hours after kidnapping, molesting and killing a Grade 1 pupil of the F. Ma. Guerrero Elementary School in Sampaloc.
SPO1 Charles John Duran, of the Manila Police District (MPD) homicide section, told the Inquirer that the girl was found naked from the waist down with a red nylon cord around her neck at around 11 p.m., inside a rented room of a house along Pat Antonio Street in Sta. Mesa.
“We found a tabloid left behind by the suspects with the headline, ‘Young girl raped,’” Duran pointed out.
A witness saw the suspects with the girl between 8 and 9 a.m. on Friday and later saw them leaving without her.
“They were positively identified by a witness as the same persons who took the child with them to the room where her body was later found,” the case investigator revealed.
Soliveres admitted to the rape and the murder of the 7-year-old girl.
He confessed to lusting for the girl the first time he saw her. “I read the tabloid and got the idea from it,” he pointed out.
Bacolo, a bedspacer at the girl’s house, said Soliveres asked him to bring the girl along.
On Friday morning, he said Soliveres told him to call the girl and ask her to go with them to a friend’s house.
“We brought her to a room that I sometimes slept in. He went inside with the girl and after a few minutes, he went downstairs. I peeked inside the room and saw the girl lying on the bed gagged wearing nothing below the waist with a tabloid beside her,” Bacolo told the Inquirer and admitted to raping the girl when he saw her naked because he was drunk.
When Soliveres returned, he ordered Bacolo out the room. After several minutes, Soliveres came out and asked for a rope. “I gave him a nylon cord, thinking that he was going to use it to seal shut the window and left. I only found out later that he had used the rope to kill the girl,” he told the Inquirer.
The duo then left to return to the victim’s house.
When the owner of the room returned at around 11 p.m., Friday, he discovered the girl’s body and reported it to the police.