President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to solely investigate the deadly shooting incident involving Philippine National Police (PNP) and Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) officials.
The incident, which was previously described as misencounter, left four people dead and four others injured.
Duterte ordered a joint panel formed by the PNP and PDEA “to discontinue their ongoing investigation,” said Palace spokesman Harry Roque.
“Nagdesisyon po ang ating Presidente na tanging NBI lang po ang mag-iimbestiga doon sa putukan na nangyari sa panig ng mga kapulisan at PDEA d’yan po sa Quezon City,” Roque said.
“This is to ensure impartiality on the Quezon City shootout incident,” he added.
Roque said that the NBI has the mandate to investigate men in uniform.
Top officials of the PNP and PDEA scrapped the ‘misencounter’ tag in the botched buy-bust operation in Quezon City on Thursday.
Police Gen. Debold Sinas, PNP chief, and PDEA Director General Wilkins Villanueva both stated that there was prior coordination before the fatal shooting incident took place near Ever Gotesco Mall.
“We’re not going to speculate on what happened. That is why we collected the cellphones of both parties, so we know where they’re coming from. We’re going to make an analytic investigation. As far as those cellphones are concerned, we still do not know what was happening at the time,” Villanueva said.
“What we can tell you is that both the PDEA and PNP were conducting legitimate operations…both of them were doing their jobs. So that’s what we’re working on. Right now, it’s too raw for us to be making a statement. Right now, we are mourning. We cannot tell who was doing what, because we don’t have the evidence. Give us time to process the evidence,” he added.
