By ERWIN ‘AMBO’ DELILAN
THE NEARLY two-year-old assassination case of Negros Occidental provincial government consultant Mariano Antonio “Marton” Cui III is seemingly turning into a “whodunit”.
Sad, but that’s the fact. Probers somehow have a lead but no identified suspects.
Whodunit {hoo dәnәt}, per the Oxford Languages Dictionary, is a story or play about a murder in which the identity of the murderer is not revealed until the end.
Marton was a consultant to the governor on hospital operations and deemed as the “right hand” of Gov. Bong Lacson. He was shot from afar by a sniper outside his office in San Carlos City on the night of April 12, 2021.
His assassination sent the province in a state of shock, considering that he was known for being soft-spoken and down-to-earth.
This assassination can be likened to that of popular television presenter Jill Dando in the United Kingdom in 1999.
Jill was shot dead with a single bullet outside her home in west London.
Though the UK Police had charged a suspect, Jill’s neighbor Barry George, the court found no substantial evidence to convict the guy, thus he was freed.
To date, Jill’s murder remains a mystery, a whodunit in London.
‘WELL-FUNDED’
In Marton’s murder, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in Bacolod just this Dec. 13 issued a pronouncement.
NBI-Bacolod chief, Atty. Renoir Baldovino, told the media that the killing of Marton was “well-funded”.
Baldovino’s statement came 11 days after Gov. Bong raised to P2 million the bounty for anyone who could give information that may lead to the case’s solution.
Atty. Baldovino further confided that their investigation “hit a hitch” after the court denied their application for a cyber warrant.
A cyber warrant, per the Department of Justice (DOJ), is an order requiring the complete or partial destruction, or the return to its lawful owner or possessor, of the computer data or any related items turned over to the court’s custody.
Supposedly, NBI-Bacolod wanted to pursue (some) leads on the exchange of conversations via text messages they’ve gathered in the course of their investigation.
‘INGENIOUS THEORIES’
Nonetheless, the “well-funded” description of the crime, which was “super used in the sentence” by Baldovino, spawned a lot of interpretations that could either be figurative, plausible, rigid, or strained.
With these, four “ingenious theories” were born, hence:
* that the “brain” behind the killing was no ordinary person
* that Marton wasn’t an ordinary being
* that the plan to kill Marton was well-executed
* that the motive wasn’t simple as well
Very interesting indeed./PN
