SENATOR Risa Hontiveros has called on PNP Chief Gen. Rodolfo Azurin to act with dispatch in investigating the killing of an environmental official in Mindanao and demanded greater efforts from the state to protect the people, especially the civil servants.
“We must prevail against these evil acts that endanger our safety and our democracy,” said Hontiveros as she strongly condemned the brutal killing of fellow Akbayan Party member Richard ‘Butch’ Cabilan, the municipal Environment and Natural Resources Officer of Dumingag, Zamboanga del Sur.
Cabilan, who was a former Division Secretary General of Akbayan Zamboanga del Sur, was attending a meeting at the Agriculture Training Center last Thursday afternoon when three unidentified gunmen ambushed him.
He sustained fatal gunshots to the head from the assailants who were waiting inside the training center.
“As a civil servant, it is very alarming that this gruesome attack happened inside the compound of a government-owned facility,” said Hontiveros as she suspected the latest killing incident in Zamboanga del Sur to be politically motivated.
Former Akbayan partylist Rep. Tom Villarin said the meeting obliged Cabilan to attain as a public servant after a memorandum sent to him by the newly-elected town mayor Gerry Paglinawan.
Cabilan used to be the campaign manager of former Dumingag mayor Nacianceno Pacalioga Jr. who ran but lost as governor in the May 2022 elections.
His daughter, Mayor Joan Pacalioga-Abejuela also lost in the Dumingag town’s mayoralty race.
In 2019, the elder Pacalioga was ambushed but survived.
“Based on our initial findings, Butch was required to attend a meeting by the new Dumingag town mayor, Mayor Gerry Paglinawan, through a memo. He complied perhaps thinking that the heat of the elections had subsided and also to comply as a public servant. After the meeting, he went to the town’s agricultural training center where three assailants were waiting in ambush,” Villarin wrote on his Facebook Page.
Cabilan was the municipal administrator when Jun Pacalioga was still the mayor.
The Dumingag municipality won an international award as an organic agricultural town in 2012, recognizing it for reducing poverty through organic agriculture farming.
During that period, the town also banned gambling and imposed a ban on smoking and alcohol in public places which they identified as causes of poverty as poor farmers and indigenous peoples (Subanens) were heavily into it.
“The killing of kasamang Butch should be thoroughly investigated by the Philippine National Police. The assailants should be apprehended and their bosses who ordered the killing be exposed. Political murders should not exist in a democracy,” Villarin said.
