NO DNA CONFIRMATION The military and the communist party say that party chair Benito Tiamzon and his wife, Wilma, the secretary general, seen in this Feb. 13, 2017, in Oslo, Norway, are dead but neither side has DNA proof that they were among those killed in a boat explosion off Samar province in August 2022. —KARLOS MANLUPIG
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on Thursday said their highest-ranking leaders, Benito and Wilma Tiamzon, were captured, tortured and killed, and their bodies were blasted, belying a military report that they were killed in a boat explosion during a gunfight with soldiers at sea eight months ago.
National Security Adviser Eduardo Año welcomed the CPP’s “confirmation” of the deaths of the Tiamzons but denied its claim that the couple was tortured and killed by the military, calling the allegation terrorist propaganda.
The CPP said the Tiamzons “suffered severe beating in the hands of their captors.”
“Internal reports cited witnesses who saw how the faces and bodies of the victims were smashed, apparently beaten with hard objects,” it said.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines said it was still awaiting results of DNA tests by the Philippine National Police to confirm that Tiamzon and his wife were among eight people whose bodies were recovered following the clash between suspected rebels and an Army riverine patrol in waters off Catbalogan, Samar, on Aug. 22, 2022.
At that time, Tiamzon was the chair of the CPP and the Marxist umbrella, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), while his wife was the party secretary general. The military also said Tiamzon was the top leader of the New People’s Army (NPA), the CPP’s armed wing.
The couple served as consultants to the NDFP in peace talks with the government in 2017 before then President Rodrigo Duterte terminated the talks because the NPA reportedly continued armed attacks while negotiations were being held to end one of the world’s longest-running insurgency.
Military account
Based on the military’s account, Army soldiers on boats sailed around the island village of Canhawan Guti, off the coast of Catbalogan, after receiving reports that an armed group was spotted onboard a motorized boat.
The soldiers, using a megaphone, instructed the group to stop for inspection. Instead of complying, the people on the boat allegedly fired at the soldiers, triggering a 20-minute gunfight before their boat suddenly exploded.
According to the military, the boat could have been carrying explosives that blew up.
The CPP rejected the military’s report. “The claimed mid-sea firefight and explosion were all a drama hatched by the AFP and its US military advisers, to hide all evidence of the ignominy of their fascist crime,” it said.
It alleged that the “already lifeless bodies of the Tiamzons and their group were dumped on a motorboat filled with explosives, and tugged from Catbalogan” before it was detonated somewhere between Catbalogan and Taranganan island.
The CPP said the Tiamzon couple and eight other companions from the guerrilla force of the central headquarters, who were unarmed, were traveling on two separate vans along the national highway eastward toward Catbalogan City when they were flagged down between 12 noon and 1 p.m. on Aug. 21 last year. By this time, “all communications with the group were lost,” the CPP said.
‘Terrorist propaganda’
Año said that security forces had long suspected that the Tiamzons were killed in a clash at sea with government troops.
“As is their practice, the terrorists’ propaganda machinery has concocted and fabricated an elaborate story which even implicates the United States in their deaths in order to squeeze whatever propaganda value they can muster from their deaths,” he said.
Año said the CPP was now “headless with no clear national leadership” with the death of the Tiamzons and CPP founding chair Jose Maria Sison, who died in self-exile in the Netherlands in December last year.
In an email exchange, CPP chief information officer Marco Valbuena told the Inquirer that the rebels have not confirmed the identities of the Tiamzons despite confirming their deaths and the alleged manner they were killed.
“We had no access to the bodies retrieved by the PNP so we could not say with certainty if the Tiamzons were among them,” he said.
According to Valbuena, one of the Tiamzon family members—reportedly Nenita Tiamzon Santiago, Benito’s sister—was willing to cooperate and provide a sample specimen for DNA comparison.
Lengthy verification
Asked for an update on the DNA test, PNP public information office chief Police Col. Redrico Maranan said that according to the police forensic group, the relatives of the Tiamzon couple “are not yet available for taking of reference samples.”
It took the communist party “several weeks to establish the veracity of the reports” of the military and it had to conduct “months of investigation to piece together the details of the capture and subsequent massacre” of the Tiamzons and the eight others, the CPP statement said.
In various media reports in December last year, an official of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (Nica) confirmed that the Tiamzon couple were among those killed in the blast in the waters off Samar four months earlier.
Nica Eastern Visayas regional director Eustacio Bacabac said that based on intelligence reports and statements from the former comrades of the couple, they were among the passengers of the motorboat that exploded during the reported encounter with Joint Task Force Storm.
“This is already positive. There is already confirmation from the security sector,” he said in reports.
The Tiamzon couple will be honored with a 21-gun salute on April 24, the 50th founding anniversary of the NDFP, the CPP said.
READ: Tiamzon couple, 8 other communists tortured and slain by AFP — CPP