EDITORIAL - Whitewash?

 (The Philippine Star) Updated November 01, 2010

The hours after the explosion that ripped through several floors of the Glorietta 2 shopping mall in Makati on Oct. 19, 2007 were confusing. Military ordnance experts who were among the first at the site said it looked

like a bomb explosion. “It’s a bomb, but as to what kind of bomb, we are still trying to determine,” then Philippine National Police chief Avelino Razon told The Associated Press the next day. “More likely it’s a terrorist attack, but what terrorist group, we have no indicator.” Then national security adviser Norberto Gonzales told a similar story to vice president Noli de Castro in a radio interview.

The blast, which killed 11 people and left over 100 wounded, occurred two weeks after then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had canceled the $329-million broadband network deal between her government and China’s ZTE Corp. The cancellation did not end the scandal, which linked her husband Mike and then election chairman Benjamin Abalos to a bribery attempt. Arroyo at the time was facing a new impeachment complaint.

Amid speculation that the explosion was meant as a distraction from the scandal, the PNP announced that the blast was not due to a bomb but methane that had accumulated in the waterlogged basement sump of a supermarket, which is a tenant of mall owner Ayala Land Inc.

ALI commissioned its own investigation by foreign experts. In January 2008, the experts concluded that the explosion was caused by a bomb with RDX, or cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, a component in the plastic bomb C-4 used for military and industrial purposes. But a final police report ruled out the presence of bomb components or any improvised explosive device at the site. Instead the PNP attributed the explosion to methane. The government said this was confirmed by experts from the Australian police and the United States.

Now the head of the Army Explosives and Ordnance Disposal team that first rushed to the explosion site, retired Col. Allan Sollano, has emerged to say that the investigation was whitewashed by the PNP to rule out a bombing. Sollano said he found at the site, in the presence of police probers, a bag containing traces of RDX.

Those now being accused of participation in a whitewash have denied Sollano’s story. As the nation remembers the dead today, the best tribute to the fatalities in the blast is a resolve to finally establish the truth.