Corpus delicti

The text joke of the day last Friday was that it was Randy Santiago, the actor with the ubiquitous sunglasses, who had jumped into the Sulu Sea with soldiers in hot pursuit off the Zamboanga peninsula.

Randy can always surface and announce that he’s still wearing his sunglasses at night, thank you. But unless Aldam Tilao, a.k.a. Abu Sabaya, surfaces and places another phone call to a radio station, warning that you don’t mess around with the guy in shades, we’ll just have to take the government’s word about his death. He’s supposed to have been fatally shot and fallen into the water in the high seas — 1,566 feet deep, to be precise (okay, we’re impressed with the precision), according to the Navy. Since Sabaya’s body still hasn’t floated to the surface, as all dead bodies eventually do, the military is presuming that he has become shark feed.

You almost feel sorry for him, reading about his life as a loser (if you’re expelled even as a mujahedin or jihadi for bad behavior, you have to be a loser). Looking at the contents of his backpack, Sabaya seems almost normal: attapulgite pills, insect repellent, lotion, antibiotics. Why, he even brushed his teeth with toothpaste! You wonder how someone who can be vulnerable to mosquito bites and diarrhea, someone who apparently worries about bad breath, can decapitate captives (including at least one priest) and lop off the breasts of women, leaving them to bleed to death. Then he tries to hawk videotapes of his group’s atrocities to the Western press.

Memories of those atrocities left little public sympathy for one of the four Abu Sayyaf suspects who died while in military custody, ostensibly from heart failure. I can’t imagine how anyone who has seen captives being beheaded and women being mutilated can be scared to death during military interrogation, but that’s what the AFP said. At least we weren’t told that the guy was fatally shot while trying to escape or attempting to grab his interrogator’s gun.

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Remember, we still haven’t seen those three remaining Abu Sayyaf captives. All we got were mug shots plus pictures of them bound together, their faces masked. We’re not sure if the masked men were those in the mug shots.

I will concede that a certain amount of secrecy is needed to extract information about an organization like the Abu Sayyaf and its leaders who remain at large, particularly Khadaffy Janjalani.

But how much secrecy, and how much civil liberties should be sacrificed in the name of the war on terror — these are the subjects of growing debate in the United States, where both foreigners and American citizens classified as "enemy combatants" can now be detained by the state indefinitely without formal charges.

Hundreds of people, mostly of Middle Eastern descent, were rounded up in the US after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. A number of them remain in detention, their fates uncertain. There are unconfirmed reports that the US has other terror suspects detained in secret places in friendly countries.

In our corner of the world, I sense maximum public tolerance for such secret operations, so long as our soldiers and cops get the bad guys. People even shrug when presented with accusations of summary executions. The attitude seems to be, if the dead men are crooks, good riddance. No need for a protracted trial, no danger of the suspects escaping from a maximum-security cell at the Philippine National Police headquarters.

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We have only one problem here: a number of those who have been summarily executed or "salvaged" in the past were monsters created by the PNP itself or the military. To fight enemies of the state or infiltrate a crime ring, you need to recruit an insider, or else train someone in the ways of crime and warfare. Often, however, such police or military "assets" eventually break away from their government handlers and strike out on their own, committing crimes and sowing terror.

Our soldiers and spooks aren’t unique in this department. Osama bin Laden was trained and backed by the Americans to fight the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. The US later dropped him and abandoned the war-torn country. The rest, as they say, is history.

The worst types of "assets" are those who commit crimes with the blessing of their handlers, as long as they share the loot. When these types become too hot to handle, they "encounter" cops. You can be sure no member of the crime ring will survive in such encounters. Dead men tell no tales.

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There have been reports that the Abu Sayyaf itself was organized with a lot of help from the military and police. The government ostensibly needed a foil against Muslim separatists; the Abu Sayyaf, meanwhile, saw an opportunity to spread its fundamentalist brand of Islam. One of the Abu Sayyaf’s original handlers, it is said, has risen to become a prominent general with strong ties to the Arroyo administration.

The military’s top brass will dismiss this as horse manure, but there’s talk in intelligence circles that Khadaffy Janjalani’s brother Abubakar Abdurajak, founder of the Abu Sayyaf, was not killed by cops about four years ago but was simply given a new identity and a new life.

And what about Ghalib Andang, head of the Abu Sayyaf faction in Sulu? Is he enjoying the mangoes in his dream orchard — literally the fruits of his hugely successful kidnapping caper in 2000?

I still have to get used to writing about Abu Sabaya in the past tense. The military’s failure to present his body immediately after the encounter last Friday gave rise to all sorts of speculations, almost all of them unflattering to the Armed Forces. How long does it take before a bloated body rises to the surface of the sea? If he became shark feed together with his two cohorts, wouldn’t there be something left over — an arm, a leg?

We all rejoiced at the news of Sabaya’s death, and we all so desperately want to believe the military. But in our minds there will always be that doubt. In criminal investigation, it’s tough to prove a crime without the corpus delicti. In Sabaya’s case, if there’s no body, there’s no closure.