Seconds that hold the key to death of Aquino

Press, 17 July 1984, Page 13

Seconds that hold the key to death of Aquino

Who killed Benigno Aquino, the most potent symbol of opposition to President Marcos, at Manila airport last year? As a Philippines commission nears its verdict after an eight-month inquiry, PHILIP JACOBSON and PETER McGILL of the London “Observer” unravel the mystery.

It was murder in the most public circumstances imaginable, a pointblank shooting in broad daylight on an airport tarmac crowded with security men and ground staff.

Closed circuit cameras were scanning the killing ground continuously. Dozens of journalists were on hand, some watching from a plane standing just yards from the spot where Benigno Aquino died in a pool of blood and, a few seconds later, his alleged assassin, Rolando Galman, was riddled with bullets. But as the investigating commission, headed by retired judge Mrs Rosie Agrava, ploughed its way through eight months of hearings, the gap between the Marcos regime’s version of events on the tarmac at Manila International Airport and the accounts put forward by others who testified grew steadily wider. The only conclusion that now may safely be made is that a remarkable proportion of the 200 people who have given evidence — from senior military commanders to a nervous 11-year-old boy — must be guilty of perjury on an epic scale. Benigno Aquino understood all too well the risk he was taking by coming home from self-imposed exile in the United States to place himself at the head of opposition to Marcos. Just three months earlier, he had been warned by the President’s controversial wife, Imelda, that “there are people loyal to us here who may try to kill you.” It was a threat to take seriously: Aquino had been the first opponent Marcos detained on declaring martial law in September 1972, and he was still officially subject to a death sentence for subversion and other offences after a rigged trial (he served seven and a half years before being allowed to leave the Philippines). Not surprising then, as Aquino slapped on a bulletproof jacket just before his plane landed, he joked nervously about being OK provided he wasn’t shot in the head.

blackening the regime. The killer had been lurking beneath the service stairs when Aquino’s escorts had led him down. None of these escorts had been armed, Marcos maintained, and they had been unable to react when Galman darted forward to fire a single shot from a .357 Magnum revolver into Aquino’s head. A karate blow from Sergeant de Mesa had knocked the assassin to the ground where he was shot dead by other security troops. To accept this version of events requires one enormous act of faith. It is to believe the testimony of the half-dozen soldiers and policemen who took Aquino from his plane. One after another, these close escorts claimed that they could tell the Agrava commission nothing of the murder of the man they were supposed to protect.

Security men ‘saw nothing’.

The two men actually holding Aquino by the arms when the shot was fired insisted that they did not see the moment of death. One maintained he was looking straight ahead, the other that a hand holding a gun had suddenly appeared over his shoulder and fired before he could react. Other members of the escort team, lagging slightly behind Aquino, should have been ideally placed to see the alleged assassin approach his victim. But they could not be budged from their unlikely stories, despite fierce crossexamination and then open, often mocking, incredulity of commission members and the rowdy public gallery. “Speak up, speak up, you’re as demure as a young virgin," hectored Mrs Agrava as one escort mumbled his way through an account of how, at the very moment Aquino was shot not 10 feet away, he had been looking down at his boots.

Only seconds after stepping on to Philippines soil, Aquino was dead — from a bullet in the head. As soon as his plane had stopped at Gate 8, uniformed soldiers boarded and led him out to a service staircase in the passenger tube, two of them gripping his arms. The commission has concentrated on what happened in those few seconds.

A single shot was fired and Aquino, in his distinctive white safari suit, was seen to plunge forward face first on to the tarmac. In the ensuing panic and confusion, all but one of Aquino’s half dozen escorts ran for cover. Only the bulky figure of Sergeant Arnulfo de Mesa, who had been holding Aquino’s left arm, could be seen, crouching' with a gun in one hand above the body of Aquino. Within 48 hours of the assassination, President Marcos advanced the official explanation. Galman, a professional hitman, had been paid by Filipino Communists intent on

To another of the team pleading loss of memory about events on the tarmac, Mrs Agrava observed acidly: “Could it be that you are determined not to remember what you saw?” The only members of the security forces who would admit to having witnessed the shooting were troops waiting to drive Aquino away from the tarmac. But their accounts of seeing Galman fire the

fatal shot were frequently confused and contradictory.

Not one of them could recall seeing the alleged assassin before the killing, despite the fact that the open service steps, under which Galman. was said to have been lying in wait, could not possibly have concealed him from their view.

None was able to explain, either, why it had been necessary to fire 16 shots into Galman as he lay on the ground. Clearly the official account of the assassination stands or falls on whether Aquino was shot after he had stepped off the stairs and on to the tarmac. Until that moment, the only people behind him were the military escorts, none of whom, the Government has always maintained, was carrying a gun. But forensic evidence has established that the fatal shot was fired from above and behind Aquino, the bullet travelling forward and downward to exit through his lower jaw. Despite some confusion, the commission concluded that there was no significant difference in height between Aquino and Galman. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for Galman to have fired a shot with such a sharp downward trajectory, if he had been standing on the same level as his victim on the tarmac.

It is not only forensic evidence and the strange collective myopia of Aquino’s close escorts which makes it so difficult to fit Rolando Galman into the official account. Who were the armed men who took him from his home four days before Aquino’s arrival, and where had he been between then and dying on the tarmac? How had he managed to penetrate the massive security cordon around the airport, carrying a large handgun, without proper credentials? The Agrava commission was able to establish that plans to take Aquino from his plane through the normal arrival channel were changed to the use of the service stairs only 10 minutes before the PAL flight landed. How could Galman have known that?

On all the known evidence, the possibility that Galman was the fall guy for an assassination which removed the Marcos regime’s only serious rival deserves careful consideration. The most convincing civilian witness before the Agrava commission testified that far from lurking in ambush, Galman was chatting casually with troops on the tarmac before Aquino left his plane.

Even more significant, Ramon Balang, a PAL ground technician, was adamant that he saw Galman in exactly the same position after Aquino’s body had pitched forward, blood gushing from a head wound. “Galman appeared to be smiling . . . both hands extended to the soldiers, palms upwards.”

Could it be that Galman suddenly realised that he had been set up and was pleading for mercy, demonstrating that he was unarmed? As Balang looked on, a soldier shot Galman, then others opened up on his prone body, firing 16 shots in all. But if Rolando Galman was not the killer, who was? For months now, rumours in the Philippines have centred upon Sergeant Arnulfo de Mesa, the escort holding Aquino’s left arm when he was shot.

There is certainly no shortage of circumstantial evidence to implicate de Mesa. He was perfectly placed, coming down the service stairs, to have fired the shot beneath Aquino’s left ear and is sufficiently tall to have done so with a downward trajectory. Although de Mesa testified that he was unarmed, paraffin tests carried out the following day established that he could have fired a gun within the previous 72 hours. Sergeant de Mesa claimed that he had been on the firing range. By his own admission, de Mesa handled the gun which killed Aquino. He claims to have picked it up after flooring Galman, but was that merely a cover story to explain why his prints may have been found on it? In the event, the murder weapon was handled by so many others that no prints, not even Galman’s, could be identified.

Reward for services?

Finally, it emerged during the Agrava hearings that de Mesa had been promoted to lieutenant not long after the assassination. Reward for services rendered? The Filipino chief of staff, General Fabian Ver, took the stand to deny the insinuation, maintaining that de Mesa had passed the relevant exams long before Aquino returned.

Many Filipinos consider that the general — a much feared man with close links to Mrs MarcoS — was not pressed nearly hard enough about this and other intriguing aspects of his own role in the Aquino affair. What about the testimony of Galman’s two children that last January, six months after the assassination, uniformed troops had taken away their mother, Lina, saying that they were acting on Ver’s personal orders?

What about Galman’s girlfriend, picked up with her sister by armed civilians barely two weeks after Aquino was killed? None of these women has ever been seen again. General Ver denied any knowledge of them.

The much anticipated appearance of Imelda Marcos at the Agrava hearings last week also proved a disappointment to many observers. She denied under oath that she had warned Aquino not to return home: since the public was barred, there was no opportunity for the sharp questioning from the gallery which has normally been allowed.

At the end of the kid gloves encounter, members of the commission joined in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday” to mark the First Lady’s fifty-fifth year.

The Agrava commission is now pledged to deliver its findings by August 21, the first anniversary of Aquino’s death. Few Filipinos expect it to accuse the Marcos regime of deliberately lying to the nation by coming up with someone other than Rolando Galman as the killer. Something along the lines of Scotland’s “Not Proven” verdict is probably as much as prudence will allow.