Foundation launched to extend legal aid to victims of extrajudicial killings

A foundation seeking to provide legal assistance to victims of extrajudicial killings was launched in Oriental Mindoro province on Monday to honor an anticrime crusader slain by policemen last month.

Lawyer Jose Malvar Villegas, founder of the Citizens Crime Watch (CCW), said the Zenaida Luz Justice Foundation, named after the CCW chapter leader in the Mimaropa (Mindoro, Marinduque, Romblon, Palawan) region, has 200 member-lawyers willing to assist families of victims.

Luz, 51, was murdered in Gloria town in Oriental Mindoro on Oct. 9. She was shot and killed in front of her house and CCW’s office by gunmen who turned out to be ranking police officers.

The suspects—Senior Insp. Magdalino Pimentel Jr. of the provincial police’s public safety company and Insp. Markson Almeranez, then police chief of Socorro town—are confined in a hospital in the capital Calapan City after they were wounded in a firefight with policemen who pursued them following the attack.

“What we are looking for are cases of murder perpetrated by policemen, drug lords, politicians and land grabbers,” said Villegas, who founded CCW as an anticrime group in 1993.

He said they would take in cases, even those that happened during martial law in the 1970s and 1980s.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime earlier sought out CCW after Luz’s killing, which Villegas described as the “first concrete case” of extrajudicial killing under the Duterte administration.