Inside job?

Police investigators are eyeing the possibility of an "inside job" in the P1.5 million broad-daylight robbery at a bank in the busy commercial district of Makati City Saturday.

"Everything will be looked into, including the inside job angle," said Superintendent Miguel Laurel, chief of the Regional Intlligence and Special Operations Office (RISOO), as he noted some questionable circumstances in the robbery.

When reached by The STAR, Metro Manila police chief Deputy Director General Reynaldo Velasco said his men are still in the process of consolidating reports from the field and he refused to make any statement on the bank robbery, the 5th to hit the metropolis this year. "I will not make any statement as yet because we are receiving conflicting reports," Velasco said.

Velasco, however, vowed to go after the 30 thieves who robbed the Equitable-PCIBank branch at the corner of Gil Puyat Avenue and Paseo de Roxas, shortly before noon Saturday.

The robbers arrived on board a gray Ford Expedition, a dark-colored Toyota Revo, a Hyundai Starex van, a Toyota sedan and a number of motorcycles. Some of them were even wearing fatigue uniforms.

The robbers escaped with their loot after a one-minute job but not before removing video tapes from recorders that are part of the bank’s security system.

Laurel said he would invite for questioning the bank’s employees to determine who among them could have tipped the robbers off on the bank’s security system. He said he is also interested in knowing why the bank was open on a Saturday.

Among the other facts which gave Laurel the impression of an "inside job" was that the robbers took the back entrance of the bank and they appeared to have advance information on the exact time of the arrival of the four armored vans that collect cash from establishments in the Makati central business district.

According to Laurel, his office has no clear idea yet on what particular robbery group staged the daring heist. "We have not identified as yet any particular group behind the robbery," said Laurel as he promised to work on the case until the suspects are identified and eventually arrested. "Raw information have started to filter in and I’ve dispatched my men to validate them."

Statement to GMA?

But Camp Crame sources told The STAR that the robbers could actually be making a bold statement to the Arroyo administration that "all is not well in the peace and order front" in Metro Manila. "The robbers were taking advantage of the lull brought about by the revival by the government of the Kuratong Baleleng case," said The STAR source. "They (robbers) knew that policemen would think twice before putting their lives on the line, afraid that they, too, would suffer the fate of fellow officers implicated in the said controversial case."

Aside from former PNP chief now Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a number of ranking police officials, some of them holding sensitive positions in various units of the Philippine National Police (PNP), were among those charged in the Kuratong Baleleng rub-out.

The robbers who pulled off the latest bank robbery could be the same group that hit two bank branches in Parañaque City recently, said the source, who refused to be identified.

Meanwhile, the Southern Police District (SPD) is training its eyes on a robbery group based in Bacoor, Cavite.

Laurel admitted receiving such report. "It’s one of the information my men are validating at present," he said. – With reports from Nikko Dizon