Big communist fish caught in Cebu

I’m totally confused as to what really caused that explosion at Glorietta 2 last Oct. 19 that killed 11 people and wounded scores of others. While Philippine National Police (PNP) investigators, with the assistance of Australian and Israeli probers, insist that it was probably caused by a gas leak, Ayala Land Inc. (ALI), through its president, Jaime Ayala, questioned their conclusion, presenting their own British specialist on waste water and effluent treatment who specializes in forensic investigation of fires. 

I got this text from a friend who commented on this issue: “Every expert in the world says, ‘methane can only form in absolute anaerobic conditions… meaning absolutely no oxygen in the place where the sump was opened. The waste in the area could not possibly produce the methane quantity needed to create such a blast. Finally, that the diesel in the tank was still there after the explosion, if it were a gas explosion, the diesel should have burned.’”

While we do not dispute the PNP’s findings that explosive fragments were not found to conclude that this blast was caused by some kind of ordnance, but blaming it on a gas leak is a poor or weak conclusion. Hence, we echo the call of ALI president Jaime Ayala for the PNP probers to dig further into this blast… perhaps they should start looking outside that proverbial box.

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In June 2006, Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia came out with her dramatic announcement declaring all-out war on the communist insurgency, especially its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). This announcement was followed a couple of weeks later by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA). When that announcement was made, the usual noisy and loud militant groups allied to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) declared that there would be bloodshed in Cebu. But like all communist propaganda, no one believed this would happen and today, no bloodshed has occurred since that declaration. Thank God for that!

However this doesn’t mean that the CPP/NPA has already left or abandoned Cebu. Proof of this came early dawn last Friday when a combined team from the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), armed with a warrant of arrest from Danao City Regional Trial Court (RTC) Judge Sylvia Paderanga, arrested a certain Ricardo Bellamia who professed to be a labor leader. But intelligence sources said that he was alleged to be behind the Dec. 12, 2002 attacks against the 78th Infantry Brigade in Barangay Kaurasan, Carmen, Cebu where seven soldiers were killed, and another attack in Barangay Calagaan in Tuburan, Cebu on Sept. 17, 2003 and many others before the governor made her historic declaration against the communist underground movement.

According to Senior Superintendent Augusto Marquez Jr., chief of the Regional Intelligence Division of the PNP, Bellamia is the secretary of the Regional White Area Committee, a legal front of the CPP/NPA and has been tagged as the deputy secretary of the Cebu Island Command and the Front Committee II in Cebu, and secretary of the Komiteng Rehiyon sa Sentral Bisayas. In short, the combined AFP/PNP intelligence group just bagged the biggest fish in this all-out war on the communists, which in effect further cripples their cause.

Meanwhile, still on the communist insurgency, other mass graves have been discovered this time in Barangay Sinoron, Davao del Sur which, according to Southern Mindanao regional police director Chief Superintendent Andres Caro III, were allegedly the skeletal remains of some 50 people who were summarily executed by the New People’s Army (NPA) which had suspected them of being “deep penetration agents” (DPAs).

These people were either sick or tired of their useless political war waged against the established government of the Philippines or they were truly undercover agents of the military, who were executed upon the orders of the politburo. There were at least four shallow gravesites in this latest discovery in the vicinity of Barangay Sinoron.

How did the military come to find those mass graves? Well, just like the discovery of mass graves in Inopacan, Leyte last year, they were reported by former NPA members who have since returned to the fold of the law. The mass graves were the result of the great communist purge in the mid-80s where thousands of communist cadres were executed on mere suspicions that they might return to the fold of the law or were merely grumbling against the CPP/NPA leadership for fighting a remote-controlled war from faraway Utrecht in the Netherlands. While I believe that the communist insurgency is waning, the NPA still poses a threat in the countryside.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.