By Calvin Cordova
CEBU CITY — Slain police official Lt. Col. Joie Yape had earned enemies in the conduct of his duties.
With this, the Special Investigation Task Group (SITG) is reviewing the cases that Yape handled that may lead to the unmasking of his killers.
Yape was gunned down while he and his wife were walking along a road in uptown Cebu City last Thursday.
“It is likely that the motive was job-related. As a former chief of the Intelligence Branch, he spearheaded cases that led to some people getting arrested, jailed or investigated. As police officers, we have so many responsibilities and along the way, we earned enemies,” Police Brig. Gen. Val De Leon, chief of the Police Regional Office-Central Visayas (PRO 7), said in a press briefing on Monday.
The SITG, headed by Police Col. Geovanie Maines, officer-in-charge of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO), is reviewing some footage of security cameras installed near the crime scene.
De Leon said he was not yet giving the SITG a deadline to solve the case.
“I will be meeting with the SITG and depending on the gathered pieces of evidence, I may give them a timeline to solve the case,” De Leon said.
De Leon said what the SITG was trying to avoid was to rush the investigation.
“If the time comes that we are going to file a case, it should be based on evidence and not on speculations,” De Leon pointed out.
Maines, on the other hand, said the SITG was already pursuing a certain angle, although he refused to reveal what as it was still being investigated.
Maines revealed that they found out that aside from fellow policemen, Yape got into a conflict with a local politician in Cebu when he headed the Provincial Intelligence Branch of the Cebu Provincial Police Office.
One of the prominent cases that Yape handled as chief of PIB was the case of former Medellin town, Cebu mayor Ricky Ramirez, who was arrested after cache of firearms and drug-sniffing paraphernalia were seized in his house during a raid last July 2017.
Ramirez was killed by a group of armed men in his hospital room in Medellin last June.
READ MORE: PNP-IAS officer killed in Cebu shooting