Abra gov hits mayors in alleged NPA hit list

BANGUED, Abra — Mayors in the province, who claimed being in the New People’s Army’s hit list, only wanted to earn "pogi points" to be given more security personnel, Gov. Vicente Valera said yesterday.

Valera said the mainstream communist movement in the province and the regional NPA command recently denied having issued a statement threatening him and other Abra politicians for supposedly being anti-communists.

"I believe the regional command of the NPA issued a statement that it had no hand in the series of statements threatening the mayors, including me," the governor said.

Valera was referring to a statement of one Ka Shalom whom Martin Montana, spokesman of the CPP-NPA Ilocos-Cordillera Regional Committee, said was non-existent.

Montana was quoted as saying that the NPA "is not in the habit of making threats and false accusations against people — politicians or otherwise — in the pursuit of its revolutionary cause."

But the NPA’s Agustin Begnalen Command, indeed, threatened Tineg Mayor Clarence Benwaren who, it claimed, has incurred "blood debts awaiting revolutionary justice."