CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – The gangland style killing here of a 67-year-old Dutch missionary and environment advocate early Tuesday afternoon showed that the culture of impunity has remained prevalent under the Aquino government.
This was according to Alay-Bayan Luson Inc (ABI) chairman Joseph Canlas in a phone interview on Wednesday. Canlas said he knew the victim, Willem Geertman for over a decade.
The victim, reports said, was told to kneel before he was shot near his office in L&S Subdivision, Barangay Telebastagan this city.
Geertman was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital from a single bullet that pierced his body after he was shot in the back by two unidentified gunmen.
“Robbery could be a motive. But Geertman’s advocacy of saving the environment in North and Central Luzon and helping farmers at the Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac should not be discounted as the reason for his murder,” Canlas said. He added that Geertman was also an anti-mining and anti-logging advocate in Aurora province in Region 3.
“It could be politically motivated. The culture of impunity persists in the Aquino government as proven by the recent killings,” stated Canlas in the dialect.
Canlas said Geertman and his people had “time and again entered Hacienda Luisita to assist and help farmers by giving them relief goods.”
He added that “only last month one of Geertman’s people at ABI visited Hacienda Luisita to help in a recent outreach program.”
Canlas said Geertman had given seminars on disaster preparedness and climate change “not just in Central Luzon but even in Pangasinan.”
In a phone interview, City of San Fernando Police Director Supt. Luisito Magnaye said, based on an initial probe, robbery could be the motive behind Geertman’s killing.
According to him, the victim had just withdrawn money from a bank before he was killed and robbed. The police chief could not yet say the exact amount of money that was in the bag carried by the victim.
Other reports said it could be more than P1 million pesos.
The suspects fled on a motorcycle after the incident.
Fred Villareal, reporter of Sun. Star Pampanga, said one of the suspects had pointed his gun at him when he tried to see the plate number of the motorcycle.
Villareal said he saw the killing of Geertman “less than a minute before it happened.”
“The victim was being bodily clobbered before he was told to kneel and then shot at,” said Villareal, vice chairman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) Pampanga chapter.
He said he was at Geertman’s office working on a story and using the wi-fi connection when the killing occurred.
