2 bodies found anew

ANOTHER two bodies were dumped again in Cagayan de Oro City’s upper village Friday noon, causing residents in the area to express fear that their community could be tagged as the dumping area for cadavers.

The area in the boundaries of Barangay Indahag, Cagayan de Oro and Barangay Gango, Libona, Bukidnon had seemingly been the preferred site for dumping corpses, most of whom had unknown identities, by perpetrators who also remain unidentified.

A resident who goes by the name “Paking,” living some 600 meters away from the crime scene, said he is already used to see recovered bodies in his neighborhood.

But he is disgusted with the perpetrators’ choice to throw away bodies in their area, saying this could probably become a “dumping area of these killings.”

He said a bunch of schoolchildren chanced upon two sacks on a hilly portion and suspected something was inside the sacks and not just mere garbage.

“So, they threw stones at them (sacks), like little children use to do whenever they find something unusual,” Paking said.

Dr. Christian Caballes, team leader, Scene of the Crime Operatives (Soco)-Northern Mindanao, said they found two bodies and theorized they could have died due to suffocation or strangulation.

Caballes said the packaging tapes that sealed the victims’ mouth might have caused their death.

He said the victims could have been killed three to five days already based on the decomposing state of the bodies.

“Pareho sila… between three to five days. Pareho sila ng pagkapatay,” Caballes told reporters.

The Soco marked two bodies as victim A and victim B. The victims bore no signs of being shot or stabbed.

Caballes described victim A, who’s aged between 20 to 30 years old, as having the words “Angel” and “TBS23” tattooed on his lower shoulder. The victim has yet to be identified.

Victim B, Caballes said, has no marks but was already identified by the family who rushed to the crime site even before the responding authorities arrived at the area.

The family identified Victim B as Jamil Mata Gandamato, 17 years old, and a resident of Sitio Barra, Barangay Macabalan.

Gandamato’s kin, however, did not entertain queries from the media about the victim.

But earlier Gandamato’s mother Norhana supposedly went to a local radio station in Cagayan de Oro to ask for assistance in finding her son, who was allegedly picked up at Gaisano supermarket in Cogon on Wednesday afternoon by unknown men on board two motorcycles without plate numbers.

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