By MEDIA SOLUTIONS
LEGASPI CITY—The Commission on Human Rights regional office here is set to form a task group that will reopen the investigation of the killing of a religious pastor more than four years ago.
Rey Matocinos, human rights investigator, said he has received a directive from CHR regional director Salvador Senar to convene the task group and revisit the case of Pastor Isaias Sta. Rosa who was killed by suspected state agents.
Sta. Rosa was abducted by hooded armed men believed to be elements of the military inside their house in Barangay Malobago in Daraga, Albay on the evening of Aug. 6, 2007.
However, shots rang out minutes after the abduction while the suspects were making good their escape. Neighbors later found Sta. Rosa dead with gunshot wounds near a creek. A few feet away from him was a dead man later identified as Pfc. Lordger Pastrana of the 9th Infantry Division.
Recovered from Pastrana’s body were a mission order issued by Maj. Marc Rosal, head of the Military Intelligence Battalion, and a .45-cal. pistol that Capt. Arnaldo Manjares, also from the 9th Infantry Division, claimed to be his lost firearm.
The firearm is still in the custody of the Regional Crime Laboratory in Camp Simeon Ola in Legaspi City.
The Criminal Investigation and Detection Group filed cases against Rosal and Manjares twice, but both were dismissed, first by the Albay Prosecutors Office and then by a panel of prosecutors formed by the Department of Justice. The case has since been archived.
Matocinos, who handled the Sta. Rosa case investigation for the CHR, admitted that the cases filed by the CIDG were weak as it had no proof that would link Rosal and Manjares directly to the killing. “There was a missing link,” he said.
Matocinos said the CHR will reopen the investigation to check some details had been overlooked. “We will also try to compare notes with all those involved in the probe, like the CIDG, Karapatan and even the family, and see if they have some information which we don’t have or which we have but they don’t,” he said.
The CHR investigator said he has talked with Sta. Rosa’s widow. “She is willing to cooperate again with us,” he said.
Mrs. Sta. Rosa had earlier said she was no longer interested in pursuing the case but later had a change of heart.
“I just hope that this time we would see the light of justice so that his death would not just be a mere statistics in police’s unsolved killings,” she said in a more recent interview.
Matocinos said it is possible to elevate the probe to the CHR en banc, if necessary.
