LOCAL police are looking for six men who were allegedly responsible for murdering a German national and his Filipina wife and throwing them into the sea in Barangay Maño, San Remigio, northern Cebu.
Police Major Ian Macatangay, San Remigio police chief, told SunStar Cebu that the six suspects were known robbers in the town.
Of the six suspects, two were already identified by police after they were able to secure testimony from witnesses.
The manhunt operation began after police recovered the corpses of Joseph Hanz Wind, 62, and his Filipina wife, Zenaida, 62, at the coastline of Barangay Maño, San Remigio on Thursday morning, November 25, 2021.
When police recovered their bodies, the couple were already heavily decomposed while their feet were tied.
A fisherman was able to uncover the bodies while foraging for shellfish at the coastline of the barangay.
Macatangay believed that the couple were robbed and tortured before they were killed.
Signs of torture were found on the body of Wind’s wife.
He said the wife was reportedly tortured by the suspects so that she would divulge the combination of their safe, which contained some of their money.
Wind, however, was immediately murdered after he attempted to fight back against the suspect, Macatangay said.
Macatangay added that they tried securing footage from the couple’s CCTV camera installed inside their house but the server used to record the footage was already gone, believed to have been removed by the suspects.
Following the incident, the Cebu Provincial Police Office (CPPO) organized a Special Investigation Task Group (SITG) to identify and arrest the suspects behind the murder.
Police Colonel Engelbert Soriano, CPPO director, said he had to create the SITG as it was a policy to establish one whenever a foreign national was involved in a crime.
Aside from the local police in San Remigio, the SITG will be composed of investigators from CPPO’s Investigation Branch, Scene of the Crime Operatives (Soco) and the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) Cebu Province. (GPL, AYB / JKV)