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Wednesday, May 05, 2004
5 held for Boracay killings
By Ruby P. Silubrico
ILOILO -- Authorities held five persons believed to have knowledge in the killing of three foreign nationals and a Filipina housemaid at a mansion in the famed island resort of Boracay in Aklan.
The five were among the 25 persons earlier summoned for questioning, a radio report, quoting an officer of Boracay police, said.
The victims were identified as Anton Faustenhauser, a German national who owns the mansion, and his Swiss-born friend Manfred Schoeni. The two others include an unidentified British national and Faustenhauser's Filipina housemaid Erma Sarmiento of Valenzuela, Metro Manila.
Faustenhauser is married to a Filipina named Josephine, who arrived in Boracay Tuesday, the radio report further said.
The victims had been found stabbed repeatedly by unidentified assailants whom police believe could have killed them either the night of May 1 or early morning of May 2.
Their decomposing bodies were found by policemen at 5:15 p.m. Monday after one of Hauser's friends in Boracay, who came to the mansion to check on him, reported that he saw the housemaid dead.
Faustenhauser is a property developer while Schoeni, one of Asia's best-known art dealers, owns two art galleries in Hong Kong.
The German's three-storey villa called Dolce Vita is built on a hill with commanding views of the island famed for its white sand beaches.
The house was in disarray when police arrived, with the bodies of the three men found on the second floor while the maid's body was found in her room on the ground floor.
Supt. Remus Canieso, head of a special police team in Boracay, said two bladed weapons believed to have been used in the murder were recovered from a lavatory in the house.
Chief Supt. George Aliņo, regional police director, said they are looking into robbery as the assailants' motive.
However, they could not yet determine if anything was stolen because the entire house was in disarray.
Aliņo said he already deployed a team from the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) to investigate the incident along with the Aklan Provincial Police Office.
He added they suspect an "inside job" which involved any of the 25 workers who were doing the landscape and constructing the swimming pool at Faustenhauser's mansion.
Isolated case
Aliņo, however, downplayed the incident, saying it is an "isolated case" that the police would solve shortly.
"This case is an isolated one. Still, Boracay is a safe place because a lot of police personnel and those from other law enforcement agencies are securing the place," Aliņo said.
Moreover, Malacaņang also dismissed the killings as "an isolated incident," stressing that the Philippines remains safe compared to "other places outside the country that are maybe more hazardous."
Presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye vowed the authorities would track down the killers and said tourists should still consider the island safe. "This is an isolated incident," he said.
"We'll have to make sure that they are not able to undertake these types of activities with impunity. We are trying to adopt all the security, all the preventive measures to make sure that our visitors are safe," he added.
The wives of Faustenhauser and Schoeni arrived in Boracay Tuesday dressed in black and inspected the scene of the crime.
Schoeni was known as one of the leading dealers in Chinese contemporary art with two galleries in Hong Kong's fashionable Soho district, and his death sent shockwaves through the tight-knit industry.
"It's a tragedy for the Hong Kong art world. His death will leave a great gap in the art world," Ian Findlay-Brown, publisher of Asian Art News and a friend of Schoeni for 15 years said.
Sammi Cheng, a member of staff at the Schoeni Art Gallery, said: "All of us here are very very upset by the news. He cared very much for us employees; he was such a good boss. He was like a friend for us."
The British victim was the son of Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's financial secretary between 1961 and 1971.
A friend of Faustenhauser, who did not want to be identified, said the expatriate community on the island in the Visayas chain was stunned.
"Boracay is small community and every one knows one another and something like this does affect us all," he said.
He said everybody on the island knew the house on Mount Luho: "From a distance the house, which covers three floors, looks like a red Mexican hat with a tiled roof."
He said Faustenhauser, 69, finished the house about 14 months ago and was subdividing his one-hectare (2.47 acres) lot into building blocks. Schoeni was building a villa next door.
Boracay has about 12,400 local residents, many of them Westerners who part-own some of the 124 major hotels, bars and restaurants.
The island had been considered relatively safe for tourists as it was some distance from the Muslim and Communist rebellions further south.
One hotel owner, who did not want to be identified, said the deaths could not have come at a worse time as the island was just recovering from terrorism alerts issued after the 2002 bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali.
"We have only just started to come out of a particularly bad patch and now this. It will set us back," he said. (with reports from JMR and AFP)
(May 5, 2004 issue)
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