(CMFR/IFEX) – A key witness in the celebrated murder case of slain Filipino journalist Edgar Damalerio was gunned down on the morning of 2 February 2005 while leaving his place of work in Pagadian, Zamboanga del Sur. Edgar Amoro, 46, a teacher at the Zamboanga del Sur National High School and the witness who positively […]
(CMFR/IFEX) – A key witness in the celebrated murder case of slain Filipino journalist Edgar Damalerio was gunned down on the morning of 2 February 2005 while leaving his place of work in Pagadian, Zamboanga del Sur.
Edgar Amoro, 46, a teacher at the Zamboanga del Sur National High School and the witness who positively identified police officer Guillermo Wapille as Damalerio’s assassin, was shot dead by three unidentified assailants at around 11:30 a.m. (Manila time) outside the school.
According to witnesses, Amoro had just exited the school’s gate when the suspects appeared and repeatedly fired at him. They then fled aboard a red Kawasaki motorcycle.
Preliminary investigations showed that Amoro succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds. The police recovered two empty .45 caliber shells at the crime scene.
The brutal killing took place despite the fact that Amoro was under the Department of Justice’s witness protection programme.
Amoro was the second witness in this case to be killed. One potential witness, Juri Ladica, was also killed in Pagadian City on 10 August 2002.
The high school teacher was one of two witnesses who went to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Pagadian City District Office three days after Damalerio’s murder on 13 May 2002. He was also the first to issue a statement identifying Wapille as Damalerio’s killer. Wapille surrendered to police two years and four months after Damalerio’s death. The second witness, Edgar Ongue, previously went into hiding, fearing for his life.
The trial was in the process of being transferred to a higher court in the southern province of Cebu for the purpose of witness security.
Amoro’s killing deals a serious blow to the ongoing Damalerio case, which has been watched closely by both international and local media organisations because of its relative progress compared to the cases of other local journalists who were killed.
Damalerio is one of 15 journalists who were confirmed to have been killed in the past three years because of their reporting. This figure excludes eight other murder cases in which the motives are still unconfirmed or the killings were unrelated to the journalists’ profession.
