By ROMEL REGALADO BAGARES
KORONADAL CITY, South Cotabato.—Wilfredo Casumpang, 53, shook his head in resignation when he heard Peruvian forensic anthropologist Jose Pablo Baraybar say it was time to pack up.
“Waay na gid (That’s all there is),” the prime mover rig driver said softly in Hiligaynon. He had come with high hopes that the forensic team led by Baraybar would finally unearth the remains of Midland Review photojournalist Robert “Bebot” Mamoy, a victim of the Nov. 23 massacre. Mamoy, 61, was Casumpang’s neighbor and still missing.
Under Baraybar’s direction, a backhoe crew–of which Casumpang is a member–returned to the site of the carnage Sunday in Barangay Salman, Ampatuan, for the last time to try to find what earlier recovery efforts may have failed to find. It had been two weeks after the slaughter that had claimed the lives of at least 57 people, more than half of whom were community journalists from five neighboring towns.
“We emptied the mass graves and found no bodies,” said Baraybar. “That, at least, settles the question on everyone’s mind whether authorities missed one or two bodies that may have also been buried in any of the graves here.”
Discrepancy
Depending on which investigative body is talking, the perpetrators–with the use of a backhoe more powerful and much bigger than the one Casumpang brought to the area on his rig early morning Sunday–dug two or three mass graves to hide their horrendous crime.
The discrepancy, Baraybar explained, is due to the fact that in the recovery efforts of the first few days, the first grave was excavated repeatedly and trampled on by hundreds of people that its original cut is now lost to an ordinary observer’s eye.
An experienced investigator of heinous crimes involving mass graves, Baraybar worked for the United Nations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. He said it is possible to determine the original configuration of a mass grave by looking at the compactness of the soil in and around them as well as the soil’s texture and color.
“The area has been excavated many times since Day One,” he said. “The tests we made today show that the first grave is actually made up of two smaller holes so it is correct to say that there are actually just two graves, with the first grave consisting of two holes.”
There is no commonly accepted definition of what constitutes a mass grave in international criminal law but some experts say that a mass grave contains at least a half dozen individuals. The UN rapporteur, meanwhile, suggests a narrower definition which states that a mass grave is one where three or more victims of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions were buried, not having died in combat or armed confrontation.
In either case, the graves at Barangay Salman, which sit in an area that used to be under the control of the secessionist Moro National Liberation Front’s National Security Command (the rebel group’s equivalent of the Presidential Security Group), certainly qualify. Ampatuan patriarch Datu Andal Ampatuan Sr. used to be a mass leader of the MNLF before the group signed a peace agreement with the government in 1996.
In the suffocating noon heat last Sunday, a backhoe provided by the provincial government of Sultan Kudarat’s engineering office scooped earth out of the graves. At the same time, a K-9 unit and two metal detector teams from the joint Commission on Human Rights-Center for International Law (CenterLaw) independent fact-finding body scoured the perimeter of the crime scene for evidence that may have been left out in the earlier investigation conducted by the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group and Crime Laboratory Services.
A team of 11 PNP Scene of the Crime Operatives stood ready to document and retrieve any piece of evidence unearthed by the fact-finding group. It was the first time that a K-9 unit and metal detectors were used at all in the crime scene—two weeks after the fact.
Missing or misidentified?
Last Wednesday, Baraybar’s team discovered at the crime scene a partial left denture with a metal clasp that did not fit any of the remains already recovered. Dental records and his family later on established that the dentures belonged to Momay, of Tacurong City, Sultan Kudarat. But the dentures did not fit the set of human remains earlier identified as belonging to Momay. The same body was also claimed by the families of Victor Nuñez and Daniel Tiamzon, both of UNTV in General Santos City.
Authorities earlier reported that a total of 57 human remains have been recovered from the site and of these, only three have remained unidentified. Of the three, two have a full set of teeth while the third has full upper and lower dentures. This, Baraybar earlier said, indicated that at least another body is still missing, bringing the fatalities in the slaughter of innocents to at least 58 persons.
Momay’s daughter Reyna Fe Castillo, said her father had called up another journalist while the convoy was en route from Buluan town to Shariff Aguak town to ask him why he did not join the convoy.
“My father told him that he was with journalists Jimmy Cabello and Jhoy Duhay in one of the vans in the convoy,” she said. She added that her father, just before joining the convoy, left his Baja motorcycle in Buluan. The nurse also saw being flashed on local television a photo taken just before the convoy left for that ill-fated trip to Shariff Aguak. The photo showed her father standing right behind Sultan Kudarat Gov. Pax Mangudadatu.
Fears
Yesterday, CenterLaw informed Momay’s family of the results of Sunday’s excavation. Mrs. Castillo struggled with her emotions as she received the news.
“Our greatest fear is that his remains were released to the wrong family,” she said, noting rumors that some unscrupulous persons, taking advantage of the news that the Office of the President was giving out P100,000 to each of the families of victims, have filed false claims that they have lost loved ones in the massacre.
All that was needed was to claim a yet unidentified body in the morgue and present that as proof of their loss, she told Centerlaw.
“There is now a stronger ground to conclude that his body was in fact misidentified,” said Baraybar. Baraybar had teamed up with a British counterpart, Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert and experienced field investigator, to lead a group of forensic investigators and lawyers from CenterLaw deputized by the CHR to conduct an independent parallel investigation on the Ampatuan massacre. If so, Baraybar said, this further complicates the case.
He said it is now very likely that Momay’s body was actually recovered but was released to the wrong family. “Unfortunately, it also means that at least one other body is still missing,” he said.
Baraybar said the recovery of deformed slugs and spent ammunition shells in the general perimeter of the crime scene means that some of the victims were shot outside the vehicles in the convoy and were then haphazardly placed back into the vehicles.
“The intent, it is clear, was to throw the vehicles with the bodies into at least one of the graves,” he said. The second grave contained the remains of six victims and the crushed bodies of a blue Toyota Tamaraw FX, a white Mitsubishi L300 FB and a red Toyota Vios.
On Monday, Baraybar’s team flew back to Manila.
Romel Regalado Bagares is executive director of the Center for International Law.