2 charged for radio host’s slay

ILOILO City—Police have filed a murder complaint against two suspected professional assassins in connection with the killing of Iloilo radio host Niel “Lito” Jimena.

Senior Superintendent Allan Guisihan, Negros Occidental police director, declined to identify the two to prevent their flight but said the complaint was filed on Friday at the provincial prosecutor’s office against them and several other unidentified persons.

Guisihan said the two were identified by a witness as the gunman and the driver of a motorcycle used as getaway vehicle. “They were not wearing masks when the gunman shot the victim at a lighted area,” he told the Inquirer in a phone interview on Sunday.

Jimena, 42, a host of political blocktime programs in Iloilo City, was shot near his house in E.B. Magalona town in Negros Occidental on August 22. He died from five bullet wounds.

Guisihan said the two suspects “are from E.B. Magalona and were also involved in previous crimes.”

Investigators have yet to ascertain the motive for the killing, but Guisihan said it was “highly” probable that Jimena was killed for being an informant of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and the intelligence section of the Iloilo City police.

“We are not ruling out that he might have been killed because of his work as a broadcaster, but our investigation points more to the drug angle,” he said.

The Philippine National Police Western Visayas office earlier said that those behind a failed 2009 assassination attempt on Jimena could also be involved in his murder.

Chief Supt. Cipriano Querol Jr., police regional director, had ordered the creation of a special task group from different police units to investigate the killing.