Saturday, November 03, 2007 Gunman kills mayor’s guard By Mia E. Abellana Sun.Star Staff Reporter
TWO bodyguards of a town mayor were shot just meters away from the mayor’s house.
Orlando Ugario, 52, died instantly, while his companion Lito Berdijo is confined at a private hospital in Cebu City, with police security.
The two are former soldiers and work as bodyguards of Ronda Mayor Esteban Sia.
Police investigators are trying to find out if anyone held grudges against Ugario, who reportedly figured in a two previous incidents.
During the town fiesta, he allegedly beat up someone. Also, there were reports that last Oct. 30, he brandished a firearm and forced someone to get off a bus.
However, Sia hopes the police will not immediately discount the possibility of politics behind the attack, as he has been receiving threats even before he was proclaimed mayor in the May 14 elections.
He also believes he was a target because another bodyguard warned him that he was second in a list while the bodyguard (not Ugario) would be first.
Sia said he will wait for the official police investigation, but admitted that he found it hard to believe that politics had nothing to do with the shooting.
The mayor heard the gunshots that night.
While he believes Ugario may have made some enemies, Sia said he doubts stories about Ugario punching people and being abusive.
He said he knew Ugario and that he would not tolerate that kind of behavior from his men.
Ugario is a retired master sergeant from the Philippine Army. He is survived by a wife and five children, one of them a policeman and one soldier.
Sia again asked Cebu Provincial Police Office Director Carmelo Valmoria to replace some of the senior police officers assigned to the town and to provide him with a police bodyguard.
Valmoria said, though, that this cannot be done immediately because of the election period, which prohibits the transfer of government employees.
Initial findings point to Ugario’s personal grudges, but Valmoria, Supt. Erson Digal and Acting Ronda Police Chief SPO1 Bertuldo Mansueto all said they are not rejecting the politics angle.
Ugario and Berdijo were sent by Sia to a nearby store to buy cellular phone load credits.
As they were heading back to Sia’s house at the corner of the highway in Barangay Poblacion, two men on a blue motorcycle drove by.
Suddenly, the passenger pulled out a gun and fired several times.
Ugario was wounded in the right side of his chest. The bullet went through his right shoulder, the right side of his back and his side.
He died on the spot. Berdijo, meanwhile, was wounded in the right leg, but he managed to crawl towards Sia’s house, some 100 meters away.
Motorcycle-for-hire drivers, who were in the area, escaped unharmed. A glass window of a house beside the road was also broken. No one was home at the time.
Responding police officers found seven shells, a deformed slug and a .45 pistol with a loaded magazine by Ugario’s head. Two other magazines were recovered from his pockets.
Mansueto believes the recovered .45 pistol belonged to Ugario.
He told Sun.Star they will be checking if the gun was licensed and if it had a gun ban exemption from the Commission on Elections, as a gun ban is still in effect for the barangay and youth polls last Monday.
Valmoria said it would appear that Ugario was the main target because the gunman made sure he was dead.
If the assailants were also targeting Berdijo, Valmoria said they would have chased Berdijo when he tried to leave.
However, he said they will still check other angles, including politics. Mayor Sia may also have sources of information that would lead him to surmise this, the police chief said.
About two weeks ago, Sia visited Valmoria asking him to relieve some of the police officers assigned in the southwestern town because they “lacked respect” for his administration.
He had sought the relief of the town police chief, Insp. Juan Casipong.
Casipong recently filed for a leave of absence and left SPO1 Mansueto in charge.
Valmoria said he received another letter from Sia yesterday morning requesting for the relief of some of the top police officers in the town.
He asked Supt. Digal, who heads the elections subtask group deployed to Cebu’s second district, and Mansueto for an assessment of the situation in Ronda.
Both said the situation was normal.
To appease Sia, Valmoria will be sending a team from the Special Reaction Unit he initially deployed to Santander and transfer them to Ronda, as the two-day religious holidays ended yesterday.
They will be augmenting the forces of the Ronda Police Station starting today.
Valmoria also assigned security details at the hospital where Berdijo is confined.
He told a Sun.Star news team that the incident does not mean their preparations for the elections and the holidays were unsuccessful.
