Bizarre, and brutal

The attacker’s identity remains undetermined, but the scale of death and destruction he left at Resorts World Manila is now clear: at least 37 victims died, most from suffocation. And yet, as both the management of the commercial and entertainment complex and police investigators now report, the attacker did not seem to act with an intent to kill as many people as he could. He fired into the ceiling and set tables ablaze. The effect was undisguised terror, but he is — at least at this stage of the investigation — not considered a terrorist.

But the horrifying incident, which lasted from around midnight to around 7 a.m. on Friday and was covered heavily on radio and on social media as it was happening, was bizarre in the extreme. Both the police and corporate management agree that the attack was perpetrated by a lone gunman. He is believed to have targeted the gaming area of the casino inside the complex, stolen millions of pesos in gambling chips (unredeemable outside the casino), forced himself into a room on the fifth floor of an adjoining hotel, then doused himself with gasoline, set himself on fire, and shot himself.

Tragically, his act of setting the tables in the gaming area on fire ended up causing the death of at least 34 of the victims; two apparently died from a collapsed ceiling; one is thought to have succumbed to a heart attack. The attacker, whoever he is and whatever motive drove him to act, is primarily responsible for their deaths.

But as long as he remains unidentified, the nature of the violence that descended on the popular complex cannot be fully understood. The Middle-East-based terror network Daesh — also known by the inaccurate name Islamic State or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) — quickly claimed responsibility for the attack. At least two security experts have agreed with the police assessment that the attack could not be considered a terroristic attack, as that term is usually understood, primarily because the available evidence shows that the gunman was not shooting directly at people when he had the opportunity to do so. The Armed Forces is also skeptical of the theory, advanced by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, among others, that the incident was, as the Isis claim asserted, a “lone wolf” attack. Former general Hermogenes Esperon, the national security adviser, said this claim was “plain and simple propaganda.”

(The same security experts cautioned against the use of the term “lone wolf,” which only serves to romanticize the idea of terrorists acting by themselves.)

It is vital, then, that the identity of the attacker be established, and soon, to help determine whether his brutal act of violence was really a desperate man’s botched attempt at a casino robbery, or whether he had ties to a terror group. The bizarre sequence of events makes more sense seen from the perspective of desperation, but we will never know for certain until the authorities identify him.

Adding to the bizarrerie was the now-characteristic grandstanding of the Philippine National Police chief Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who showed up at the resort complex in combat gear and proceeded to do battle with the truth. In interviews, he said that the attacker had been killed by the police (“Napatay ito ng operating troops, sa fifth floor”), that a security guard had panicked and shot himself accidentally (“Yung isang gunshot wound na nadala sa hospital, yan yung security guard na nabaril niya sarili niya—accidental”), that the situation was under control hours before the gunman killed himself. Each statement was untrue, and it took Dela Rosa a few hours to finally filter the information he was receiving and make sense of it.

But it may be that the most disturbing aspect of the entire incident lies in this eyewitness description, supported by other survivors. In the mayhem that ensued after the attacker started firing and setting tables on fire, the people inside were telling themselves, “May Isis, may Isis.” Whether or not Isis influence has reached our shores, it is clear that scare tactics are working. More people believe that Isis is here.