Dear Mamang Pulis (to our neighborhood cop)

Victor Vasnetsov. After Prince Igor’s Battle with the Polovtsy. Detail. 1880. Oil on canvas. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. Rigth-clicked from http://www.abcgallery.com

If Maan Bustaliño , Marcial Taldo, and Wahab Akbar , had been shot on a street corner or a restaurant, during their off-hours, it would have been a police report or a crime story, one of many stories, probably a second or third headline.

The Philippine National Police (PNP) through Directors Razon, Barrias, Gatdula, had classified yesterday’s bomb blast as an assassination, even a political assassination, of Wahab Akbar, judging from the evidence gathered at the washed-out crime scene (the firemen hosed down the burning vehicles last night flooding the crime scene with lots and lots of water; didn’t you see it?), the bomb was detonated by remote as Rep. Akbar approached his ride.

According to his colleagues, Wahab Akbar had a heavy security detail, heavier than the “average” congressman; so it was not easy to get at point-blank range with him. What’s an assassin to do?

The PNP now has it all tied up in one neat little theory. After all, the victim received many death threats, there was an election protest against him, he had enemies; why, just last summer in the aftermath of the beheading of 15 Marines in Basilan, he cleared the MILF and then some quarters accused his men of the beheadings. He sure had enemies. It’s one neat political assassination.

I’ll tell you a secret. Just between the two of us. Contract-killers, or guns-for-hire, the ones that cowardly murderers pay P30,000 to P100,000, those cloak-and-dagger characters, they don’t like glamour, they go around by word-of-mouth, they work in two’s or three’s, they invest in confidentiality, contacts, time and not much equipment. And they don’t leave their motorcycle behind!

The PNP bomb squad had intimated that the incendiary device had a signature (the trigger and all). A political assassination by motorcycle bomb remotely detonated by cellphone.

When the PNP said it had a signature, what they fail to ask themselves is:

Is it a signature, or a copycat of a signature; or part of something?

What they fail to ask themselves up to now is:

Was the operation itself a signature? Look at it.

They shot through and shattered your armor. They brought the war of the dying and the dismembered at the doorstep of the House of Representatives. This organized group is crying for someone’s attention, it roughly knows the rudiments of propaganda, it’s selling something, it likes T.V.. Look at it.

(I know, it’s easier to wrap it up in a neat little political assassination theory and the PNP is doing its best, and as investigators go, they’re just interested in those little fragments of evidence from the rinsed-out crime scene, maybe that’s all their job is; but at some point maybe they could get a perspective.).