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MANILA – Even for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, the sight of an off-duty police officer killing in cold blood a mother and son he was desperately trying to protect was too brutal.
“I don’t think you can escape the rigors of justice because it was caught on television. Even I am dumbfounded … That is unfair and too brutal,” Duterte said during his televised cabinet meeting on Monday night. December).
He said he had seen the five-minute video of Sergeant Jonel Nuezca, 46, shooting at point-blank range Mrs. Sonya Gregorio, 52, and her son Anthony Gregorio, 25, on Sunday afternoon in the city of Paniqui, Tarlac province.
Police reports said the fight started after Gregorio detonated an air cannon made from PVC pipe, creating loud noises and deteriorating in a heated discussion over a land dispute.
Throughout the incident, Ms. Gregorio had her arms wrapped tightly around her son to prevent Nuezca from taking him away.
Seconds before the shooting, Nuezca’s daughter, a minor, approached Mrs. Gregorio, patted her arm and told her to let go of her son.
“Drop it! Drop it!” the girl screamed. Mrs. Gregorio told him: “Tell (your father) to let go.”
When the girl yelled that her father is a policeman, the woman replied “I don’t care!” and mocked her.
Nuezca asked Mrs. Gregorio: “Do you want me to finish you right now?” Then, without warning, he pulled out his 9mm pistol and shot him in the head, with dozens of bystanders and at least two people recording video with their phones. Then he shot Mr. Gregorio, also in the head.
Just before fleeing the scene, he again shot Mrs. Gregorio in the head when she was lying on the ground.
The brutal killings sparked a wave of outrage directed against the government and once again shed a stark light on perceived abuses by police officers allegedly emboldened by a president who was said to be spoofing agents waging his bloody war against the drugs.
But Duterte said that Nuezca crossed the line.
“You don’t follow the law, you rescue, you kill, then I’m sorry. That’s not part of our agreement on how we should do our job … Lock him up and don’t let him out,” he said. .
He described Nuezca as an “aberration” in the police force. “He has something wrong with his head,” he said.
But the president’s critics insisted the incident was not an “isolated incident,” as his allies had claimed, and that it should lead to police reforms and halt his controversial crackdown on drug trafficking.
Duterte has stood firm behind the police, as the death toll in his war on drugs surpassed 8,000.
Human rights groups have reported higher figures and said the violence has continued even as the country remains under a coronavirus lockdown announced in March.
Duterte attributed most of the killings to turf wars between drug gangs, and exonerated the officers involved, saying they simply responded when they fired.
He has said that he will pardon any officer found guilty of murder while he carries out his repression.
Critics have said that this high-level rhetoric is being interpreted within the police force as “permission to kill.”
“The government knows that the bloody murder of a mother and her son in Tarlac is no longer an isolated case. There are bloodthirsty police officers everywhere,” Rep. Ruffy Biazon told the Politiko online news site. He said it was “a symptom of what could be making him sick” to the police.
Representative Stella Luz Quimbo presented a resolution Tuesday seeking a congressional investigation into the killings, as they relate to the “tactical knowledge and mental aptitude” of the country’s 200,000 police officers.
But Brigadier General Ildebrandi Usana, a spokesman for the Philippine National Police (PNP), said it was not necessary.
“This is an isolated case. (A case) has already been shelved, and the removal (of Nuezca) will be forthcoming. The PNP will have to move forward,” he told ABS-CBN News.
He said the police force “has already had many changes that had already started.”
More than 4,800 wayward police officers have been fired and some 17,000 face administrative cases, it revealed.
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