[av_one_full first min_height=” vertical_alignment=” space=” custom_margin=” margin=’0px’ padding=’0px’ border=” border_color=” radius=’0px’ background_color=” src=” background_position=’top left’ background_repeat=’no-repeat’ animation=”]
[av_heading heading=’PEOPLE POWWOW | Regardless of motive, it was terrorism’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGOGO
[/av_heading]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
Sunday, June 4, 2017
[/av_textblock]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
IT WAS around 1 a.m. on Friday when I woke up because of the urge to pee. I should have slept on returning to bed, but the unfolding flash report on Manila-based DzRH kept me awake. A real-life drama was unfolding; it was about a gunman opening fire at the second-floor casino of the Resorts World Manila hotel while setting the carpeted gaming tables and floor on fire.
I could hear a crying woman telling reporter Noche Cacas she was looking for her husband, who had left home to play at the casino. She happened to be the former Azenith Briones, a movie actress I had known in the 1980s.
When the smoke cleared, the incident had left 38 people dead (including Azenith’s husband and the charred gunman who could not be identified) and 67 wounded. What happened that day is still the stuff that today’s TV, radio and print media discuss. There are still questions that ache to be answered, foremost of which is this: Was it an act of terrorism?
One of the earliest guesses came from the other side of the globe, with no less than US President Donald Trump calling the violence “a terrorist attack.”
Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa thought otherwise: “This is not an act of terror. There was no element of violence, threat or intimidation that led to terrorism.”
And from the PNP-National Capital Region director Oscar Albayalde: “We cannot relate it to terrorism because he did not shoot anybody,”
But Defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana yesterday could not be so conclusive when he said, “We are not yet ruling out that this is an ISIS act.”
Everybody knows that ISIS stands for the extremist “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”.
By then, a sketchy report from Amaq News Agency had named ISIS as the organization behind the hotel attack.
As we were going to press yesterday, President Rodrigo Duterte had made no statement yet, uncharacteristically of him, on the Resorts World incident. Why, oh why? Could it be that he had finally listened to his advisers?
One recalls that when he declared martial law in Mindanao, he had not previously discussed it with the Cabinet – not even with Defense secretary Lorenzana.
Going back to the hotel siege, any thinking individual should have taken the view of Lorenzana. For one, this writer finds it hard to believe in “robbery” as the motive – given the futility of the gunman’s act of allegedly pocketing casino chips, since by then he had fired shots and burned hotel property; no casino would convert stolen chips into cash.
What if Jeff Santos, one of the casino players, was correct in his observation that the gunshots he heard at 1 a.m. were coming from different directions, hence could not have been perpetrated by a lone gunman?
Anyway, even if we are to accept robbery as the gunman’s motive, that would not rule out terrorism. Any act of violence as a means to an end is a form of terrorism. That could be ground for the President to declare martial law nationwide.
But let Duterte not repeat somebody else’s mistake. Remember when the late President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 “to save the Republic” but ended up destroying it?
In the meantime, may we just guess that the gunman had gone nuts after losing all his money in the casino?
Steve Cutler, a former US Federal Bureau of Investigation attaché to Manila, speculated in a TV interview that the gunman was “desperate to the breaking point for some kind of debt or something like that and thought that this was the only way out of it.” (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
[/av_textblock]
[/av_one_full]
