Cops zeroing in on 4 more Platon ‘killers’

CAMP VICENTE LIM, Laguna — Police are hunting down four more suspects in the killing of former Tanauan City mayor Cesar Platon a week before last year’s elections, following the arrest of the alleged triggerman.

Superintendent Roberto Rosales, Quezon police director, said the suspects, including the man who hired Eduardo Vidal, who was nabbed in Gumaca town, are being tracked down in Quezon.

Rosales was certain that Vidal, 27, was a hired killer and a robber, not a New People’s Army member.

Vidal was presented to Chief Superintendent Domingo Reyes Jr., Southern Tagalog police director, yesterday, four days after he was arrested in a drinking bout with four friends in Villa Padua, a coastal village in Gumaca, Quezon.

Platon’s secretary, Nora Orpillano, has positively identified Vidal as the gunman because of the scars on his left arm which, she said, she saw when the suspect, while kneeling, pumped bullets into Platon. She was just an arm’s length from the former mayor.

Platon, she said, was giving away popcorn to people during a Lakas-NUCD campaign rally on the night of May 7 last year when he was gunned down.

Two other witnesses corroborated the statements of Orpillano who now fears for her life. "We cannot discount the fact that the suspect (belongs) to a big criminal syndicate who can do harm to us to get even," said her sister Tess.

Reyes has ordered the Tanauan police chief to provide security to Orpillano.

Murder charges will be filed against Vidal with the prosecutor’s office in Tuy, Batangas to-day.

Platon’s wife, Ma. Vilma Bess, believes a "big fish" was behind her husband’s murder.