Gunmen shoot dead Sorsogon cop
By Jorge Hallare LEGAZPI CITY --- Gunmen suspected to be New People’s Army rebels gunned down a policeman in Matnog, Sorsogon on Friday, a report received by the Police Regional Office in Bicol (PRO5) on Saturday, June 10, said. Sr. Insp. Ma.Luisa Calubaquib, PRO5 spokesperson, said PO3 Ramir G. Sy, 36, a member of the Matnog Municipal Police Office, was in the vicinity of a tourism office in Barangay Camcaman, Matnog at 7:20 a.m. on Friday when two armed men approached and shot him in the head. Sy was the second policeman to be killed in a span of two days. “Witnesses told police that when the suspects were sure that Sy was already dead they fled on board a motorcycle without a plate number,” she said. Calubaquib said scene of crime operatives found several empty shells from a .45-caliber gun in the crime scene. She said investigators believed the gunmen to be members of an urban liquidation squad of the communist rebels known as “Sparrow unit.” A day earlier, on Thursday evening, four armed men shot rookie policeman PO1 Noel Pili in Nabua, Camarines Sur. He was dead on the spot from gunshot wounds in the head, various parts of the body and buttocks. (See full story on this page. Earlier this week, on June 3, Emory Garil, a retired policeman, was fetching water from a water pump near his house in Barangay Culasi, a remote village in Matnog, Sorsogon, when two gunmen approached and riddled his body with bullets. The successive killings have prompted Chief Supt. Melvin Ramon Buenafe, PRO5 director, to issue an alert order to the Bicol police to take extra security precautions and implement the “buddy system.”