Mayors’ league pushes full probe: 2 suspects in Pa’sinan mayor’s slay arrested

INFANTA, Pangasinan – Police arrested on Tuesday two suspects in the killing of Mayor Ruperto Martinez of this town and filed murder charges against them before the provincial prosecutor’s office.

This, as the provincial mayors’ league condemned the killing and asked authorities to conduct a thorough investigation.

“We are saddened for we know him to be a simple and quiet man,” Dasol Mayor Noel Nacar, league president, said.

Pangasinan first district Rep. Jesus Celeste told local media he wrote the chief of the National Bureau of Investigation in Dagupan City to conduct a separate investigation into the killing.

Celeste said he would also ask police to provide security to the family of the slain mayor who have expressed fear for their lives.

Infanta Vice Mayor Virgilio Vallarta, who filed his candidacy as vice mayor with Martinez as his mayoral candidate, said he believes politics was behind the killing.

“As far as the police are concerned, this is now a solved case but it is not yet closed because we will not stop until the masterminds are identified and arrested,” said Senior Supt. Mariano Luis Verzosa Jr., acting provincial police director.

Of the two arrested suspects, witnesses tagged Richard Manuel as the triggerman, while Ricardo Legarda drove the getaway motorcycle when they shot Martinez with a .45-caliber pistol in his residential compound afternoon of Dec. 15.

Verzosa said they are eyeing a controversial mining pier project and politics as possibly behind the killing.

“That (mining pier issue) is where the problem evolved,” he said. A few hours before the killing, some 600 residents staged a protest rally against the construction of the pier where nickel from Zambales would be brought.

Verzosa said police intelligence agents monitored the two suspects in a resort in nearby Dasol town where they checked in aboard an unlicensed motorcycle that fitted the description of the motorcycle used by Martinez’s killers.

The two were eventually apprehended after a brief chase when they failed to stop at a police checkpoint along the national highway in Barangay Macalang, Dasol town. However, no guns were seized from them.

Verzosa gave assurance that the two suspects are not fall guys, saying that witnesses, three of them minors, positively identified them, as they wore no helmets when they allegedly shot Martinez dead.\

Verzosa said Infanta town would be among their priority areas of concern in next year’s elections, along with Urbiztondo, Agno, Sta. Maria, San Manuel, Malasiqui, Rosales, and Balungao towns and the cities of Alaminos, Dagupan and San Carlos.