Marcos wants investigation into Percy Lapid slay to continue
MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. wants the investigation into the killing of radioman Percy Lapid to continue even with the gunman and mastermind both identified.
In an interview with Palace reporters aboard a plane en route to Cambodia, the chief executive urged investigators to get to the bottom of how an order to kill a journalist could have come from inside the national penitentiary.
“We’re trying to make sure that we know exactly what this is all about. The more we look, the worst it gets, this is too deadly right now,” he was quoted as saying partly Filipino in a report by state-run Philippine News Agency.
“We’ll just keep going. Until we’re satisfied. Right now, because we haven’t spoken to all of the named suspects, middlemen, masterminds, the investigation hasn’t been closed."
The National Bureau of Investigation's probe into the incident found that the kill order came from Bureau of Corrections chief Gerald Bantag, who is currently under preventive suspension.
“He established his own fiefdom there in the prison. He acted with no fear of being punished,” Marcos said of Bantag, who coursed the kill order through six people — including inmates and gang leaders in the New Bilibid Prison — before it finally got to confessed gunman Joel Escorial.
Bantag's right-hand man, Ricardo Zulueta, the deputy security officer at the Bureau of Corrections, is still at large and was last seen up to five days ago.
Bantag and Zulueta faces two separate murder complaints before the Department of Justice, over the deaths of Lapid — whose real name is Percival Mabasa — and inmate Jun Villamor, the middleman in the case.
Asked if he had any special directives for the NBI and the Philippine National Police, Marcos said: "They know their jobs. They don’t need me to tell [them and] teach their job… In terms of investigating, they know what to do. But we have to look at [why it happened] and see what happened here? What went on inside the prison that this happened?”
“They’ll keep doing a good job until we come to the actual final, conclusion of this investigation,” he added.
For Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla, they “don’t see anyone else” other than Bantag who ordered the killing of Lapid and Villamor.
He however acknowledged that everything is possible, although it must be backed by evidence. "From what we have it starts there. We still haven’t seen anyone else. We just follow the money and we just follow the evidence. It’s hard to speculate," Remulla said on Tuesday. — Franco Luna with reports from Kristine Joy Patag
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