A barangay councilor whom the Quezon City police tagged as the “No. 1” source of illegal drugs in Kamuning was found dead on the street early Friday morning, hours after his reported abduction the previous night.
Around 4 a.m., the body of Julius Dueñas, 37, was found on NIA Road with two gunshot wounds in the head, his hands tied with plastic cord, and next to a cardboard sign calling him a pusher.
The Quezon City Police District (QCPD) said investigators also recovered four packets of “shabu” from the slain Dueñas, a three-term kagawad of Barangay Kamuning.
The QCPD-Kamuning station commander, Supt. Pedro Sanchez, said a number of drug users who earlier surrendered under Oplan Tokhang pointed to Dueñas as their source. “His name consistently cropped up,” the officer added.
Around 11 p.m. on Thursday, Sanchez said, a barangay tanod (watchman) responding to a commotion in a compound at Bernardo Park in Kamuning, near the city jail, saw Dueñas also arriving at the scene on a motorcycle.
The watchman later told the police that he saw a man forcing Dueñas into a red van.
Footage from the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the area did not produce clear shots of the abduction, Sanchez said.
Barangay Kamuning chair Jayson Encomienda cited reports from residents that several men were earlier seen in the area asking about the location of the CCTV cameras.
“They looked for a blind spot and grabbed Julius from there,” Encomienda said in an interview.
Encomienda, a childhood friend of Dueñas, said he had heard of allegations linking Dueñas to the drug trade. “I’ve warned him many times but he kept denying them,” he said.
“He kept telling me it was all gossip and politics, especially because of the supposed barangay elections in October,” he added. (Congress has agreed to reset the elections to 2017.)
In April, when the city government ordered an on-the-spot drug test on local officials, Dueñas was nowhere to be found, Encomienda recalled.
“I even had him picked up from his house, but he wasn’t there,” he said, adding that Dueñas was the only barangay official who had not taken the test.
Sanchez said his peers in the barangay government were looking for a possible link between Dueñas’s killing and the death of Edwin Cariño, a barangay tanod and suspected drug user who was gunned down in August.
He said Cariño’s cell phone showed text messages linking Dueñas to the drug trade.
Both Sanchez and Encomienda said Dueñas was once helpful in giving tips about suspected drug pushers in Kamuning. “He used to be an informant,” Sanchez said. “Whether that has something to do with his death is still under investigation.”