Gunmen assassinate senior Filipino policeman
MANILA (Reuter): A four-man hit squad yesterday ambushed a senior Manila policeman cleared this year of kidnapping charges and shot him dead in front of shocked commuters in a rush-hour traffic jam.
Witnesses told police four gunmen wearing jeans and white T- shirts opened fire sending a hail of bullets through the windscreen of Maj. Jose Pring's blue Mitsubishi Galant car.
Pring, who was driving alone on his way to work at the capital police headquarters, was hit several times and died before reaching hospital, a spokeswoman for the De Ocampo Memorial Medical Center said.
A local television crew stuck in the same traffic jam near the Malacanang presidential palace began filming the assassination but their camera was snatched at gunpoint.
The murder follows the killing in May of Pring's police colleague Timoteo Zarcal by the communist hit squad known as the Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB).
Pring, a no-nonsense policeman known for his toughness, and Zarcal were acquitted in April of protecting a kidnap gang preying on ethnic Chinese Filipinos.
Corrupt police and soldiers are widely suspected of involvement in scores of kidnappings in recent years, mainly of wealthy businessmen or their relatives.
Philippine Vice-President Joseph Estrada told a radio interviewer that the ABB were the prime suspects in Pring's killing.
"The ABB admitted the killing of Major Zarcal. They said the next would be Major Pring. And Major Pring said, 'come and get me.' So whom will we suspect this time? No one else," said Estrada, who is head of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission.
A street vendor who saw the killing said he had spotted the gunmen in the area and they appeared to have been waiting for Pring.
"I was buying flour. I heard a shot and I looked and heard successive shots," another witness told a radio interviewer.
TV presenter Ces Drilon, whose van was a couple of cars away from Pring's, said she thought the victim was still alive when he was pulled from his car.
The killers, young men in their 20s, fled on foot after snatching the TV crew's camera and threatening to shoot the cameraman.
The ABB death squads, known as Sparrows, killed more than 200 policemen and soldiers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but have carried out relatively few attacks in recent years.
Named after a labor leader shot dead by troops in the 1970s, the group has pledged to target corrupt policemen and government officials.
The ABB claimed responsibility for small bombs thrown at three oil companies earlier this year and attacks on several policemen.