Photos shown to new witnesses

By Oscar C. Pineda and Kevin A. Lagunda

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

THE police have “more or less established some motive and means” behind the death of Ellah Joy Pique, said Senior Supt. Patrocinio Comendador.

“We have substantial reason to believe our investigation is on the right track,” he said yesterday, exactly a month since the abduction outside a public school in Minglanilla town.

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Comendador, spokesperson of a task force on the case, told reporters the police found pictures of a Caucasian man and a Filipina inside the house in Naga where a sports utility vehicle (SUV) was earlier picked up.Investigators went to Minglanilla last Monday afternoon to show the photos to witnesses. The police placed the pictures beside other images, which Comendador said is the proper procedure in identifying suspects.

He declined to give details, while the police are waiting for the affidavits to be subscribed by the witnesses.

“We are establishing the presence of the two personalities that we are after…and they were in Minglanilla just seconds before the abduction,” he said.

The task force will tap the Bureau of Immigration and Philippine Center for Transnational Crime for the foreigner’s background.

Comendador said they have a witness whose testimony is circumstantial, but this person was at the scene shortly before the kidnapping.

“We have witnesses during the abduction, just minutes before and after the abduction (of Ellah Joy Pique),” he said.

Two witnesses, according to a GMA 7 report, issued a joint affidavit last Friday. They saw the dark blue Pajero in Barangay Sayaw, Barili the night before Ellah Joy was found dead at the bottom of a cliff in the area last Feb. 9.

The witnesses, who came from their friend’s birthday party in Barangay Mantayapan, were going home when they saw the vehicle stop near a beach resort. Then they saw a Caucasian man disembark and begin to take something from the back of the vehicle. But he stopped when he noticed them.

When they were about 50 to 70 meters away, they saw the foreigner carry a sack with something inside it and place it on top of a road barrier. Then he pushed it down.
One of the witnesses, a woman, said she remembered the Pajero’s license plate: LHJ-382.

The police recovered a Pajero in Naga City last Friday night, with license plate LMJ-382. The letter “M” had been tampered to make it appear like an “H.”

Comendador said they will not use the three children who identified Sven Erik Berger and Karen Esdrelon as the ones who allegedly abducted Ellah Joy in Minglanilla.

“For the time being, we are using other witnesses in order not to contaminate the statements and not to give the defense later a chance to make loopholes in our case,” he said.

The task force also got DNA samples before Ellah Joy was buried.

The task force will meet again today to discuss their investigation.

“We are expanding our investigation, we are expanding our imagination in solving and in building up the case,” said Comendador.

Interviewed separately, Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia said she is satisfied with how the task force is doing its job and said she regularly receives updates.

She declined to discuss these updates with reporters.

“I only interfere when the police are not doing their work, and when they already know some information and yet they withhold it,” said Garcia.

Former Cebu Provincial Police Office director Erson Digal resigned his position recently, after the governor said she has lost trust in him because he withheld information from here on the Pique case.

These days, the governor said she is confident the police are doing their work more carefully and providing just enough information for the public to understand they are doing their job.

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on March 09, 2011.