FILM critics Alexis Tioseco (right) and Nika Bohinc. Photo from www.jigsawlounge.co.uk
Cash donations gathered two years ago at the funeral wake of slain film critics couple Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc has been converted into a P1 million reward for information that would lead to the arrest of one of four suspects in their killing.
Members of the Tioseco family and several of the couple’s friends went to the National Bureau of Investigation on Friday to announce the bounty for the arrest of the couple’s housemaid Criselda Dayag, 45, who was the only suspect positively identified by a witness.
The two film critics were shot to death on Sept. 1, 2009, inside their house on Times Street, Quezon City, by three armed burglars who were allegedly tipped off and allowed access into the home by Dayag.
Gang Badoy, the couple’s friend who acted as the spokesperson for the group, told reporters that the suspect had been tagged by a fellow housemaid as the killers’ accomplice when she overheard Dayag talking to the men in a local dialect.
The burglars allegedly ransacked the house and shot to death the couple, who had arrived and stumbled onto the robbery. The suspects then fled aboard Tioseco’s car.
Apart from an arrest warrant against Dayag issued by a Quezon City regional trial court, Badoy said the housemaid has a standing warrant issued by a Pasay City court for a robbery case in 1999.
She pointed out that Dayag had gained employment at a Pasay City home and, with the help of her accomplices, allegedly robbed her employers.
NBI investigator and lawyer Rizaldy Rivera said that suspicion fell on Dayag because there was already a pattern in her alleged activities. “She was employed as a housemaid by a Chinese businessman in Pasay City in 1999 but she and two cohorts hogtied her employer and robbed him,” he explained.
He added that the NBI is looking into three angles into the killing but only revealed one: That aside from taking the cash and jewelry, they tried to kidnap the couple for ransom but Tioseco fought them off.
Asked why the other housemaid was not killed, Rivera told the Inquirer that Dayag’s coworker and the only witness to the crime was 63 years old and she was blindfolded and hogtied by the suspects. “She was no longer a threat to them,” he said.
Badoy stressed in Filipino, “It has been almost two years but we cannot bear to let go of our crusade (to find justice for the couple). ”
She confided, “Before, murders to us were just numbers. After what happened to Alex and Nika, we realized that all we read about murders in the newspapers and watched on TV had families and friends who lost loved ones. They are real. These people are all real.” Jeannette I. Andrade