PRESS STATEMENTS & INTERVIEWS, 2001 - Present

Press Statement

Romulo Kintanar Had Too Many Rivals and Enemies in the Criminal World of Military and Police Operatives

24 January 2003

It is idle and malicious for anyone to speculate or insinuate that I have something to do with the killing of Romulo Kintanar. I am being given too much credit.

The political, military and police officials of the reactionary government should not jump to any conclusion far ahead of the findings and conclusions of any credible police investigation.

Otherwise the public would sense that the reactionary authorities are trying to cover up something and are not really interested in discovering the truth.

At least three theories have surfaced:

1. After becoming an intelligence operative of the military and police, under the guise of being a "consultant" and then security chief of the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation, Kintanar became involved in numerous criminal operations in which corrupt military and police officers were either his cooperators or his rivals and enemies.

The criminal operations included protection rackets, armed robbery, murder for hire, collection of unwarranted fees from overseas contract workers and sale of women entertainers abroad. It is reported that Kintanar became involved even in the Nida Blanca murder case, in which a large amount of money from a high politician was a stake.

2. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Special Forces have long been known as seething with hatred over the killing of some US military personnel, particularly JUSMAG official Col. James Rowe, in the 1988-1990 period when Kintanar was in charge of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The US seemed uninterested in holding him to account for the aforesaid killing of Americans. Instead, it has now and then unjustly blamed me for those killings. The killing of Kintanar could be the prelude to one more assassination plot against me, particularly under the wide latitude given by Bush to CIA covert operatives to engage in "wet operations" or assassinations.

3. It is widely known that Kintanar made himself liable for punishment by the revolutionary forces because of the crimes he committed while he was inside the revolutionary movement and after he became an enemy intelligence agent. He earned a lot of blood money by betraying revolutionaries and by engaging in criminal operations.

If any revolutionary force punished Kintanar, it would likely admit responsibility in due time. If he was killed by his rivals and enemies in the criminal world or by the CIA and its local assets, then there would be no reason to wait for any statement of responsibility from any revolutionary force. It would also be unlikely that the police investigators would ever come up with credible findings and conclusions.

As far as I am concerned, I have never taken any interest in Kintanar other than publicly exposing his criminal activities, which were either damaging to the people and the national democratic movement or threatening to my life and physical integrity in the last year of Estrada’s presidency. Every time that I denounced him, I was satisfied that I was able to expose and frustrate him to some extent in his wrongdoing.

Obviously, Kintanar took a self-destructive course by becoming an intelligence agent of the reactionary government, engaging in criminal operations and getting mixed up in the rivalries and enmities of military and police officers. #