PERHAPS they killed her because of her name? The 20-year-old teacher abducted by unknown armed men last Wednesday in Davao City and found dead late on Thursday in Carmen, Davao del Norte bore an unusual name: Rebelyn. It is only human nature to speculate that her name was an act of everyday poetry, chosen in homage to her father.

Rebelyn’s father, Leoncio Pitao, is a rebel in deed: He is better known as Commander Parago of the New People’s Army.

By all accounts, Rebelyn had chosen the straight and narrow; if she was suspected by the military or the police of aiding the communist insurgency, or being an insurgent herself, there is no evidence, no offer of proof. Her only crime was to be her father’s daughter.

When news spread that Rebelyn had gone missing, and then that she had been found tortured to death, public opinion in Davao City immediately hardened into the fact of perception: That she had been abducted and killed because her father was a communist guerilla.

The wealth of man-on-the-street interviews in the wake of her death provides a vivid snapshot of what people familiar with the situation or who had heard about the killing were thinking. The thoughts of a mother (of a 20-year-old daughter too, as it happens) were representative: “She’s innocent and she has nothing to do with her father’s revolution.”

It also quickly became conventional wisdom that the military was behind the gruesome crime. A cigarette vendor spoke for many when he said, in the vernacular: “Who else could do that? Are we idiots? They can deny it, but we know that it is only the military that has the capacity and the motive to do something as brutal as that.”

The public perception that military agents were behind the kidnapping, possible rape and killing of an innocent settled swiftly, discomfiting responsible military officers. Maj. Randolph Cabangbang, the spokesperson of the Armed Forces’ Eastern Mindanao Command, confessed that he was upset. “It’s really a concern. And we are bothered. That is why we have opened our doors to investigations for the truth to really come out. We want this issue to come to its end.”

In Malacañang, President Macapagal-Arroyo ordered the Presidential Committee on Human Rights to conduct an investigation, and asked the independent Commission on Human Rights to conduct a parallel probe too. “The President ordered the investigation of the reported killing of the daughter of Commander Parago. The state also recognizes that this is a violation of human rights and that those responsible should be punished,” Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said.

At least that much is clear: This is a human rights case, not an ordinary crime. We can start from that.

But where do we end? We can readily assume that many members of the military found Rebelyn’s death a terrible and needless act. They would have thought so not only out of common decency but also because of a basic precept of warfare. Families of combatants ought not to be included in the order of battle.

But as has come to light in the last several years, the military continues to harbor extremists or mercenaries, who will not think twice about abducting UP students or killing peasant leaders. Under the Arroyo administration, this failure to end “special operations” (or this willingness to continue using them) has a symbol: now-retired general Jovito Palparan.

The idiosyncratic tough-guy mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, who is friends with Commander Parago, called Rebelyn’s killing “a deed most foul.” (To be sure, this is also how kith and kin of the Davao Death Squad’s many victims must feel, when they see their child or cousin or friend or playmate dead in the street. The only difference is that they’re not friends of Duterte’s.)

We can agree with Duterte on this one. The problem is, Duterte himself is a poster boy for the get-tough policies of the Arroyo administration. The President has reserved special praise for Duterte’s no-nonsense approach to law and order, and even appointed him, once upon a time, as her consultant. But as should be clear by now, President Arroyo has other consultants, other poster boys for sanctioned violence. Rebelyn was just another victim.