COTABATO CITY — A soldier who allegedly killed two villagers and wounded two minors in a shooting rampage in the upland Magpet town in Cotabato province on New Year’s Eve is now under the custody of the police.
The 41-year-old suspect, Sgt. Alin Anthony Buna Jimenez, was turned in by his superiors in the 10th Civil Military Operation Battalion to the police about 16 hours after he shot the 18-year-old Eljey Repolidon dead in the town proper of Magpet.
Major Danilo Dillera, chief of the Magpet municipal police, on said Tuesday that Repolidon’s friend, Jason Baclao, who was wounded in the a ttack, later succumbed to bullet wounds in a hospital.
Two minors, one of them a local social media blogger, were slightl y wounded in the gun attack, according to Dillera.
Brig. Gen. Jimili Macaraeg, director of the Police Regional Office-12, said Jimenez, who belongs to an Army unit involved in community peacebuilding projects in Magpet, first had an altercation with a villager who questioned him about his use of a motorcycle without a license plate.
Witnesses told investigators that Jimenez drove away and returned already armed with a pistol. He opened fire at bystanders gathered near a roadside burger store in Barangay Poblacion in Magpet.
Jimenez initially escaped, but was turned over several hours later by officers in the 2nd Company of the 10th CMO Battalion and the Army’s 72nd Infantry Battalion.
Macaraeg said that he has directed the Magpet MPS and the Cotabato Provincial Police Office to immediately file criminal charges against Jimenez.
BAGUIO CITY — Authorities have yet to identify the two fatalities in the collision between a commuter van and a delivery van along the National Highway in Purok 2, Barangay Nagcuartelan, Aritao town in Nueva Vizcaya on Tuesday morning.
The accident occured at 6:28 a.m., according to the Nueva Vizcaya Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office-Emergency Response Team (NVPDRRMO-ERT).
NVPDRRMO-ERT said that the commuter van was traversing the highway when the driver was said to have lost control of the vehicle. The van uncontrollably sped up and collided with an approaching closed delivery van.
Because of the impact, the driver of the commuter van and the passenger beside him were pinned down, which made it hard for the responders to extract them out of the wreckage.
The victims were later announced dead because of their serious injuries.
The other 20 passengers of the commuter van sustained injuries and were attended to onsite by personnel of the NVPDRRMO.
All the passengers were brought to the hospital for treatment.