A day after Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim extracted their confession, two men charged with the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl were killed in what police described as a “scuffle” Tuesday night at their place of detention.
The Manila Police District said Roderick Soliveres, 28, tried to grab the gun of his police escort but inadvertently shot his fellow suspect, Cecilio Bacolo Jr., 19. Another officer responding to the commotion then shot Soliveres.
Police earlier said the two men, members of the Sigue-Sigue Sputnik jail gang, had admitted to kidnapping, sodomizing and strangling a first grader from the Sampaloc district.
The girl was found dead Friday last week, naked from the waist down with a nylon cord around her neck, at a house on Pat Antonio Street in Sta. Mesa. She was last seen alive with the two suspects, who allegedly connived to lure her from her Sampaloc residence, where Bacolo was a bed spacer.
When arrested on Friday, Soliveres admitted to lusting after the girl, saying he had asked Bacolo to bring her to him after reading smutty tabloids.
The scuffle took place after Soliveres was ordered by night-shift investigator Senior Police Officer 1 Ramil Dimaguiba to empty the container serving as an improvised urinal at the homicide section detention cell inside the MPD headquarters at around 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to deputy homicide chief Senior Inspector Ismael de la Cruz.
Escorted by Dimaguiba on the way to the toilet, which was about three meters away from the cell, Soliveres then tried to grab the policeman’s sidearm. In the struggle that ensued, the gun went off and hit Bacolo in the chest, De la Cruz said.
Another officer on duty, PO3 Rodel Benitez, rushed to the scene and shot Soliveres in the face.
When the two men were presented on Monday to Lim, a former Manila police chief who had earned the moniker “Dirty Harry” for his controversial anticrime methods, the mayor asked them point blank: “Nakakatulog pa ba kayo sa ginawa niyo (Can you still sleep after what you’ve done)?”
It was the second time this year that a crime suspect was killed while under the MPD’s custody after allegedly snatching a police escort’s gun.
On the night of February 4, Chinese national Gong Shu Yang, a suspect in the murder of his girlfriend Zhao Chun Lan, allegedly shot himself after taking his escort’s pistol while on board a service vehicle on their way to the prosecutor’s office.
Originally posted at 04:48 pm | Wednesday, March 14, 2012