More witnesses identify ‘pirates’ captured on Visayan Sea
By Jaime Espina
Correspondent

BACOLOD CITY—At least three more witnesses have come forward to positively identify the five alleged “pirates” from Masbate, who were overpowered and captured by the crew of a fishing boat they allegedly tried to hijack in the Visayan Sea on Tuesday.
       Although Cadiz City police chief, Supt. Norberto Boston, declined to identify the three, he confirmed they were among either commercial fishing boat operators or crewmen victimized by the alleged pirates.
       This developed as Emmanuel Lobrido, head of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) office here said that, even granting that the alleged pirates were members of the Masbate Bantay Dagat, as they claimed, they violated the law by operating outside their jurisdiction.
       The five—Allan Sun and Douglas Jerafta, 45, who carried identification papers as stringers of the blocktime program “Dos Cantos” on Masbate City station DYME anchored by Masbate Tri-Media Club chairman Diosdado Briones; Ronaldo Gabriel of Calachuchi Village, Milagros, Masbate; Nilo Mercader, 20, of Cauayan and Diosdado Ado, 18, of Nursery Village, Masbate City—were captured by crewmen of F/B Cadiz City, which the suspects boarded in the waters off Islas de Higantes in Carles, Iloilo.
       Lobrido pointed out that the seas off Islas de Higantes “are beyond the 15-kilometer municipal water limit within which commercial fishing is banned.”
       The capture of the five happened three days after another Cadiz fishing boat, the F/B Laura owned by the Commercial Fishing Boat Operators Association president, Roy Vijandre, was hijacked Sunday, also in Panay waters, and released the next day in exchange for P150,000.
A crewman of the Laura said the five suspects were also among the men who hijacked their vessel.
       However, seven other suspects, including three policemen and three police assets, Sun and Gabriel said, who were with them, managed to escape
by jumping overboard and cutting loose their pump boat.
       Boston said the five suspects were uncooperative and insisted that they could not remember the names of policemen and police assets with them during the aborted hijacking, and claimed that the firearms allegedly seized from them—an M-16 carbine and a KG-9 submachinegun—belonged to the officers.
       They also insisted they were Bantay Dagat members authorized by the Masbate provincial government but failed to present mission orders or other documents to prove their claim.
       The most Gabriel admitted to reporters earlier was that a certain “Jun” of the Masbate-based 506th Provincial Mobile Group rented the pump boat Noel G, one of a fleet of 14 owned by his uncle Nelson Gatotal, for P2,000 on Monday afternoon, hours before they embarked on their “antiillegal fishing patrol” the evening of the same day.