Police vow to pursue Bantag following Ifugao raid

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine National Police on Monday vowed to pursue “every lead” until former Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) chief Gerald Bantag is captured after police officers failed to find him in a poultry farm in Lamut, Ifugao, on Sunday.

“Every lead will be pursued, every lawful opportunity will be acted upon, and we will not stop until they are brought before the courts to answer for the charges against them,” PNP chief Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. said in a statement.

“We will not allow the passage of time or repeated attempts to evade arrest to weaken our resolve,” he added.

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The Ifugao police said that they failed to locate Bantag during an operation called “Oplan Raniag” at Clifford Olivas Poultry Farm in Barangay Pugol on Nov. 1.

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READ: No sign of ex-BuCor chief Bantag in Ifugao poultry police operation

No arrest

The operation was carried out by members of the Ifugao provincial police and the 1501st Regional Mobile Force Battalion 15 under the supervision of Col. Jeremias Oyawon, Ifugao police director. They reached the farm at 5:20 a.m. and tried to serve the warrant at 5:30 a.m. before pulling out at 6:20 a.m.

The Cordillera regional police later confirmed that “no arrest was made because the subject was not present at the identified location when police personnel conducted the operation.”

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Bantag is wanted for the murder of radio broadcaster Percival Mabasa, more known as Percy Lapid, who was shot dead on Oct. 3, 2022, by two men on a motorcycle near the Las Piñas City subdivision where he lived.

In April 2023, the Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court ordered the arrest of Bantag in connection with the killing of the broadcaster who had repeatedly criticized the BuCor chief in his online radio show.

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The National Bureau of Investigation raided Bantag’s houses in Sta. Rosa City, Laguna, and Caloocan City in April 2024, but failed to find him there. Since then, he has eluded arrest despite a P2-million reward offered for his capture.

In May this year, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) issued a red notice against Bantag, which requests all law enforcement agencies worldwide to “locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.”

Mayor’s tale

In a social media post on Nov. 1, Lamut Mayor Mariano Buyagawan Jr. said the raid conducted at 5 a.m. that day was based on “top secret information” that Bantag was hiding at the poultry farm and posing as one of the workers.

Buyagawan, who wrote about waiting anxiously for the results of the police operation in a manner that most netizens, based on the comments, found funny and others, irritating, added that the police left empty-handed after failing to find the BuCor chief.

“What they found was just a single chicken feather swaying in the air, like a soul that had just left. Like a ghost of All Saints’ Day that vanished at exactly five in the morning,” he said in his post.

In a post the following day, the mayor said he did not invent “the story of the failed arrest of General Bantag.”

“It really happened. That is the truth. The difference is probably in the way I constructed it. Maybe it sounded too sweet, too dramatic, too emotional—like a suitor who wants to be noticed,” Buyagawan said.

While the mayor insists his post was not a joke, a lawyer of Bantag, who had posted that the former BuCor official was at his son’s birthday party in San Fernando City that same day, told the Inquirer that he was merely joking.

In a Nov. 1 post, Lauro Gacayan cited a local media report about the attempted arrest and questioned whether a person could be in two places at the same time.

“Who appeared for him [Bantag] in today’s birthday celebration of my son Ryan Derick in our San Fernando City residence?” Gacayan wrote on social media, which showed a photo of him with Bantag and a table full of food.

But when asked by the Inquirer about his post, Gacayan said it was just a joke because Buyagawan was also “obviously joking” about Bantag being in Lamut on Nov. 1.

Gacayan acknowledged that he serves as one of Bantag’s lawyers, adding that he also served as lead counsel for the late Col. Ricardo Zulueta, Bantag’s former deputy at BuCor.

Bantag and Zulueta were each charged with two counts of murder in connection with the killing of Mabasa and New Bilibid Prison inmate Cristito “Jun” Villamor Palaña.

Inmates reportedly killed Palaña, who allegedly served as a middleman in the plot to kill the broadcaster, by suffocating him using a plastic bag.

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Zulueta, on the other hand, died on March 15, 2024, at a hospital in Bataan, with his death certificate citing cerebrovascular disease and intracranial hemorrhage. —With a report from Inquirer Research