How to kill a Dragon

Everything the public knows at this point about the killing of Melvin and Meriam Odicta raises questions, none flattering to the Philippine National Police and the administration.

According to initial reports, the couple were shot while disembarking from a “Ro-Ro” boat at the Caticlan Jetty Port around 1:30 a.m. on Aug. 29. They were taken to hospital but were declared dead on arrival.

Melvin Odicta was neither an ordinary bystander nor the latest unfortunate “collateral damage” in President Duterte’s declared war on drugs and crime. Earlier, police had tagged him as the ringleader of the biggest drug syndicate in Iloilo, a shadowy, untouchable figure said to have gone by the name “Dragon.”

After news reports mentioned him as an alleged drug lord, Odicta and his wife presented themselves at Camp Crame in an effort to clear their names. It was Interior Secretary Mike Sueno who received them; PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa was reportedly not around at the time.

Per his lawyer, Odicta engaged in legitimate businesses in Iloilo such as a restaurant and a taxi franchise, and had no pending cases. If he thought his precautionary move was enough to ensure that he would be out of reach of the long arm of vigilante justice—which appears to have become the automatic fate of many accused of involvement in drugs—he thought wrong. It didn’t take a week from his public surfacing for gunmen to take him, and his wife, down.

That Odicta was killed by unidentified gunmen was the official police story. But soon came additional details from other sources that appeared to belie the cut-and-dried character of the report. The most startling was the claim by Odicta’s lawyer Gualberto Cataluña that, unlike his wife, Odicta didn’t die on the spot. He was hit in one foot and was alive and standing, according to the lawyer, when cops hauled him off in handcuffs and put him in a police car, presumably to be brought to a hospital for treatment.

Cataluña said he saw this with his own eyes, but couldn’t get near his client because police cordoned off the scene immediately after the shooting. Eventually, he said, he learned that Odicta was pronounced dead on arrival at Malay District Hospital—not from a wound in the foot but from fatal shots to the head and body.

Was it a rubout? Was Odicta finished off on the way to the hospital, while in police custody? The appearance of it was persuasive enough for Malacañang to announce that a task force had been formed to look into Odicta’s death, along with an addendum from presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella: “The director of the Western Visayas region police has said that they do value the life of every individual and respect due process.”

Odicta might indeed have been the “biggest drug lord in Iloilo,” as the cops have tagged him. But no one can be certain of that now, not even the courts whose ultimate authority under the justice system to determine guilt or innocence has been usurped and made moot by the swift and irrevocable judgment of death meted out apparently in the confines of a police car.

The PNP itself says Odicta was a high-value target whose supposed knowledge of the drug trade in his turf would have been invaluable to the administration. Keeping him alive for what he knew would have greatly boosted the authorities’ efforts to build an airtight case against the drug syndicates they blame for, among others, the vigilante killings that have alarmed even the international community.

Or was that precisely why Odicta was silenced? So that he could squeal no more and possibly implicate not only other drug runners but also their powerful protectors? Note that these protectors have the means to launch an operation that, if Odicta’s lawyer is to be believed, involved, one, the cops looking the other way (the killing occurred near a police detachment, but the cops reportedly went scarce after the shooting), and, two, the delivery of a dead man who, merely minutes earlier, was seen alive by witnesses.

How realistic would it be to expect the PNP to get to the bottom of this case and punish those in its ranks that may have summarily killed a suspect? The announcement of a task force is welcome news, but whether it does its job remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the killings only seem to get more brazen by the day.