With less than a week before Christmas, Quezon City policemen remained busy busting alleged drug pushers, killing five more in separate operations since Monday.
Like in previous incidents, the Quezon City Police District said the targets shot it out with the officers and were killed in the ensuing gunfight.
The latest to fall on Tuesday night, 36-year-old Vicente Belaro Jr., was reportedly a drug pusher operating in Barangays Holy Spirit and Payatas.
A report to the QCPD director, Chief Supt. Guillermo Lorenzo Eleazar, said a trap was set for Belaro around 10:30 p.m. on San Miguel Street in Payatas. He allegedly fired a .45-caliber pistol at the team conducting the buy-bust and was later found carrying three sachets of suspected “shabu.”
On Monday, QCPD operations also ended in the death of four more suspects.
A man known only as Jomer was killed round 2:30 a.m. in Barangay Greater Fairview by members of the Station Anti-Illegal Drugs (SAID) unit of QCPD-Fairview. Jomer was described to be 25 to 30 years old and had tattoos on his arms.
Around 7:40 p.m. that same day, a QCPD-Batasan operation on Nawasa Road, Barangay Holy Spirit, killed Joel Parian, 35, and Leo Pacula, 55. Both men were reported to be on the police watch list, with Pacula’s house on Nawasa Road allegedly being used as a drug den.
In Barangay Sauyo in Novaliches, the police conducted an entrapment operation against Henler Baduya and his brother, Lito.
But only Baduya was home when the officers entered his house at Sitio Cabuyao, where he allegedly initiated a shoot-out after a drug transaction.
The QCPD said eight sachets of shabu and a .38-caliber revolver were recovered from slain Baduya.
The incidents raised the number of drug suspects killed in police operations at 237 since July, according to Eleazar.
QCPD’s tally of “deaths under investigation” or killings carried out by unidentified assailants stands at 208. Of this number, Eleazar said, only 36 have been confirmed by investigators to be drug-related while 21 were found to have nothing to do with the war on drugs.
The remaining 151 cases are merely suspected of having links to illegal drugs, the official explained.