Killing of event organizer a case of mistaken identity?

MANILA, Philippines—A woman who was gunned down by masked men wielding high-powered firearms on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City last Tuesday night might have been mistakenly killed, police said.

“We have yet to determine the motive and we are looking into all possible angles and leads,” Chief Inspector Rodelio Marcelo, chief of the Quezon City Police District’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Unit, said, adding that one of the angles they were looking at was that the victim might have been mistaken for someone else.

According to him, Cheryl Agnes Sarmiento, 39, an event organizer, was driving her husband’s car, a Toyota Altis, when she was killed. Her husband is an official of a gas company.

The police said that the shooting occurred at around 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday in front of a gasoline station on Commonwealth Avenue corner Regalado Street in Fairview, Quezon City.

The victim, who was alone in the car, had stopped at the intersection and was about to turn left when three men (an earlier report said four men) dressed in bonnets and black jackets alighted from a van and fired at her vehicle.

Case officer Police Officer 2 Jogene Hernandez said that based on witnesses’ accounts, the men who were armed with M-16 rifles and 9mm guns fired at least 50 times at the victim’s vehicle.

Sarmiento was hit several times and died on the spot.

The police said they had yet to talk to her husband.