CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – The Regional Trial Court (RTC) here has found guilty of murder the gunman in the killing of Dutch missionary Wilhelm Geertman on the compound of his Alay Bayan Luzon Inc. office in this city on July 3, 2012.
RTC Branch 48 Judge Christine Marie Capule declared Marvin Marzan Nuguid “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” and meted him life imprisonment for the muder of Geertman, who was 67 when he was shot dead by at least three suspects, including Nuguid. Geertman had been doing missionary work in the Philippines for about 40 years up to his murder.
In December, 2012, the prosecutor’s office here filed only robbery with homicide cases against the suspects, but this was contested by Geertman’s partner Ma. Aurora Santiago who insisted the case was murder.
Geertman was shot dead by two persons on the compound of the ABI office in Barangay Telabastagan here. One of the suspects took his shoulder bag which contained cash and documents, after he was forced to kneel down before being shot in the back.
Nuguid was identified as the gunman who fatally shot Geertman.
In her bid to upgrade the charges to murder, Santiago said she was aware of the threats and harassment against Geertman.
“At one time, an Army officer publicly tagged him as a supporter of the NPA [New People’s Army] during a meeting in Aurora village called for by the military,” she recalled.
Santiago also said the suspects were merely hired killers. Two other suspects have remained at large.
In the Petition for Review, the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), counsel for Santiago, argued that the investigating prosecutor failed to appreciate the facts and the evidence that the main purpose of the perpetrator was to assassinate Geertman and not to rob him. The charges were later changed to murder.
The NUPL said: “If the purpose of killing Wilhelm was to facilitate the alleged robbery, then they [suspects] should have shot him immediately… Instead, they went into the trouble of making him ignominiously kneel down thereby costing them several minutes before they were able to carry out their alleged plan.”
“These acts,” the lawyers pointed out, “clearly show that they intended to kill him, and they divested him of his personal belongings only after killing him.”
The militant Bagong Alyansang Makabayan-Central Luzon said, however, that justice has not been fully served in the Geertman case.
“He was merely the gunman, not the mastermind,” the group said in a statement.
Nuguid was arrested in March 2014 in Mexico, Pampanga on separate robbery charges and was later identified as the suspect in the killing of Geertman. When arrested, he was armed with a .45 pistol and was wearing a bullet proof vest.
The RTC also asked Nuguid to indemnify the heirs of Geertman for P75,000 each for three forms of damages, even as it also dismissed the robbery charges against him “for the failure of the prosecution to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt.”
