Rookie cop abducted in North Cotabato helped nab NPA leader
Police Regional Office 12 is based in General Santos City, South Cotabato. (PRO-12, file)
COTABATO, Philippines — Authorities believe the abduction of PO1 Briston Catalan on Wednesday was retaliation for his role in the arrest of a suspected New People’s Army leader.
Key Army and police intelligence sources told The STAR on Thursday that his abductors belong to the Guerilla Front 53 of the NPA’s Southern Mindanao Revolutionary Committee.
Catalan, an intelligence agent of the police office in Makilala municipality in North Cotabato, is a resident of Barangay Katipunan in Kidapawan City, the capital of the province.
North Cotabato is the name more commonly used for Cotabato province, its official name.
Catalan was riding his motorcycle to Makilala along with his two children when rebels flagged them down along a secluded stretch of a farm-to-market road in Barangay Katipunan.
The NPAs let Catalan's children go but disarmed him and took him away.
Superintendent Romeo Galgo, Jr., spokesman of the Police Regional Office-12, said on Thursday that officials of the Cotabato provincial police are still trying to locate Catalan and his captors with the help of barangay leaders.
Local officials said Catalan was instrumental in the arrest early this month of Ariel Rebuta, who is allegedly a senior NPA community militia leader in Barangay Biangan, Makilala.
Rebuta was cornered in his hideout on August 2 by combined personnel of the Makilala municipal police and the Army’s 39th Infantry Battalion.
The raid that resulted in his arrest was launched with the help of neighbors who had complained about the NPA’s excessive collection of “protection money” from them. The communist rebels, who claim to have set up a revolutionary grovernment, call the collections revolutionary taxes.
Barangay residents said Catalan was instrumental in confirming the presence of Rebuta in Barangay Biangan.
It was also Catalan who reportedly pinpointed the house where Rebuta kept the assault rifles and explosives that authorities confiscated.
Soldiers are now in pursuit of the rebels who snatched Catalan, according to Capt. Silver Belvis, spokesman of the Army’s 39th Infantry Battalion.
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