Hontiveros: Suspend entire Jolo police station amid probe into bombings
MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Risa Hontiveros on Wednesday called for the suspension of the entire police force in Jolo, Sulu days after twin bombings there on Monday.
She said doing so would allow authorities a freer hand to investigate the bombings.
Less than a month before the Monday bombings that claimed 14 lives and injured many others, personnel of the Jolo police shot dead Army intelligence operatives who were on a mission to track suicide bombers. Local police initially reported it as a shootout but an investigation into the incident found that the Army men had not fired back.
During her privilege speech at the Senate’s plenary session on Wednesday, Hontiveros called on the national police to give the public an explanation on the possible connection between the two events—a connection that Maj. Gen. Corleto Vinluan Jr., AFP Western Mindanao Command chief, acknowledged was possible—casting fear over what she said was "intelligence reports emerging that the female suicide bombers responsible for the blasts were two subjects of" the Army intelligence mission in June.
"Did our policemen put Jolo and our nation at greater risk when they not only interfered with Army intelligence operations, they killed our operatives? How many months and years of intelligence and counter-terrorism effort did we lose on June 29?" she asked.
June 29 shooting
Police leadership continues to assert that the cops were on a legitimate police operation, saying there was no "proper coordination on the part of the AFP with the territorial Police units" despite what Hontiveros says is "overwhelming evidence demonstrating prior coordination between the AFP and the PNP" on the day of the shooting.
"We cannot turn away from this. The targets of the June 29 mission were two female bombers. Investigations into the August 24 bombing show that it was perpetrated by two female bombers. Straight question: did terrorist elements somehow influence, directly or indirectly, the killing of the soldiers?" the senator also said.
What happened in Jolo justifies creating more checks and safeguards on police operations, punishing the guilty, enacting stricter laws to preserve the evidence, and ending the pattern of police abuse.
— risa hontiveros (@risahontiveros) August 26, 2020
At the time, the Philippine National Police called the incident a "misencounter shooting," which the military rejected. The police force later claimed that one of the murdered soldiers could be linked to illegal drugs.
As of this publishing, the National Bureau of Investigation has already filed murder raps against the nine cops involved in the shooting, although PNP leadership has yet to slap administrative suspensions on them, almost a month after the incident.
RELATED: NBI: One soldier in Jolo incident with police shot eight times
In response to the bombings on Monday, both the police and the military floated the idea of placing the entirety of Sulu under martial law. “This will allow the military and police more operational flexibility to carry out law enforcement operations against domestic threat groups in the area,” Police Gen. Archie Gamboa, the chief of the PNP said in a statement.
The Palace later said that Duterte was mulling the idea over and had already issued directives to the PNP and AFP.
"We need more decisiveness from the PNP. We need remorse for the acts of his men, not justifications unsupported by the evidence. We need accountability and justice," the senator wrote on Twitter.
"With the killings of the police officers and the subsequent terrorist attack killing fourteen, we need to ask "where does the buck stop?" Is it enough to have accountability from the local level PNP?" she also asked at the hearing.
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