Until yesterday, no suspect had been apprehended in connection with the fatal shooting last week of Dutch missionary Willem Geertman. Police said robbery was the likely motive, noting that the killers took with them a bag containing P1.2 million that Geertman had just withdrawn from a bank.
Militant groups, on the other hand, see the killing as an extrajudicial execution, claiming that Geertman had been the subject of harassment and vilification by the military in previous years. The military, which has denied accusations of engaging in extrajudicial killings in the past, has cautioned against rushing to conclusions.
Malacañang officials, for their part, have stressed that the killing had nothing to do with the agrarian reform problem in Hacienda Luisita. Geertman, 67, was the executive director of Alay Bayan Inc. Reports said he had been assisting farmers in the sugar estate owned by the family of President Aquino.
Obviously the best way to determine the motive is to arrest the killers. This should be helped along by the release of footage from a closed-circuit TV camera, posted on the Facebook account of a militant group, showing three men on a motorcycle, believed to be the murderers, leaving the crime scene in Barangay Sto. Domingo, Angeles City, Pampanga. The faces of two of the men are visible in the video; the driver’s face is concealed by a helmet.
Surely there are people who can recognize those two faces. Reports said there is an eyewitness who was spared by the killers. If the two are members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines or law enforcement agencies, it would be best for the concerned unit to turn in the two men for questioning. There are rotten eggs in every organization. What redeems the organization is the resolve to rid its ranks of scalawags. It might also turn out that the men in the video are not the killers. The only way to find out is to bring them in for questioning.