Hostage Crisis in Manila ends in tragedy

I seriously don’t know what to do to alleviate the mixed emotions I’m feeling right now.

The Philippine police needs some serious revamping of their strategies of hostage situations in my opinion. Last night, before I headed off to my office (I work in a callcenter), I had a glimpse of the headlines on TV and saw that the negotiations seemed to be coming into fruition. It seemed that everything was going in the right direction and that the long night of the hostages were going to come to a peaceful end soon.

When I took my first break from calls at around 11:30PM, my officemate (who had a later shift than mine and came to work at that very moment) told me that almost everyone had died in the bus, including that bastard hostage taker Rolando Mendoza.

Heavy dismay fell over me.

And here I thought that no blood would be spilled, that no lives would be snuffed out. What the hell just happened?

When I got home, I updated myself, reading the headlines and articles on the internet. What I found out was downright humiliating. From what I’ve discovered, Mendoza was fired and denied benefits from his duty as a police back in 2008 when he was discovered to be involved in a drug heist and extortion cases. His hatred boiling over, Mendoza hijacked a bus full of Hong Kong tourists and some Filipinos. He cuffed the bus driver to the steering wheel and demanded the ombudsman to reopen his case and clear his name from the shabu heist. Isko Moreno, the head negotiator, along with Mendoza’s brother, entered the bus to negotiate with the hostage taker.

Rolando trashed the letter of the Ombudsman, for some unknown reason. In an act of vile support, his brother egged him into not surrendering unless he will be granted reinstation as a police officer. This simply aggravated Mendoza, firming his grip on the hostages’ lives. Round 1 of negotiations had failed, all thanks to Mendoza’s Cain-like brother. As a result, the brother was tagged as a co-conspirator and apprehended. When the bro saw the media recording EVERYTHING (which was another major blunder), he suddenly made a break for it, shouting he was being arrested, all this while the world was watching the drama, including Rolando in the bus!

The provocation caused Rolando to finally snap, killing around 8 hostages with his M-16 assault rifle. The bus driver was able to escape, and alert the authorities that ALL had died on the bus. This moved the SWAT to action, moving in a uniformed pace towards the tour bus and smashing the windows with a sledgehammer and struggling to open the front door and escape hatch. Mendoza let out a barrage of gunfire blindly through the bus window, realizing his end was near. The SWAT returned fire with a hail of bullets, shells jumping through the smoke. Aimed at practically nothing, risking hitting the tourists with their gunfire. A sniper finally nailed Mendoza on the head, killing him and ending the. crisis.

But it was all with a price.

The result was a carnage. 8 tourists dead, a crippled tourism (we have officially been blacklisted by the HK Security Bureau as a country NOT to be travelled on by ALL tourists. Yes, it’s true, and utterly humiliating. See it here), and public backlash of outrage and disappointment. It all could have ended peacefully, it could have been prevented HOURS before its actual bloody conclusion. Deaths could have been avoided.

This has been the second time the PNP failed miserably in a hostage situation. The last one was around 5 years ago when a crazed man held a small boy captive in a bus terminal for hours, with the police doing absolutely nothing. When the man saw no progress, he stabbed the boy. Then and ONLY then, did the police move into action, shooting the man AND the boy by accident, botching the operation.

If anyone from the PNP is reading my blog, I flip my middle finger to you with utmost gusto. You all lack professionalism and the power to end a hostage crisis. You have humiliated our people and our country with your lack of judgment and insolence. I’m not even surprised China is now seething and is banning us from entering their territories. I worry over the safety of our OFWs in China and HK. This cannot be left alone. Something has to be done about this, retrain these bastards if you must. Fire whoever trained these losers for being such pansies in a real situation, because this will happen again.

To the media, I also flip my middle finger to you. Why would you broadcast this crisis for the world to see? Are you all after attention that even our darkest moments must be witnessed? BBC has criticized us for not instigating a media blackout. If not for your hunger for attention, Mendoza might not have seen his brother being apprehended and he wouldn’t have gone trigger happy inside that damn bus. To hell with you.

Please, please make the caranges stop. This is just… too.. inhuman.

Advertisement