WHO KILLED BENTAIN?

Edgardo Bentain was suspected of being the source of a video tape showing then Vice President Joseph Estrada playing cards in a VIP room at one of the casinos. The videotape was handed to Manuel “Manoling” Morato, Erap’s political nemesis, during the 1998 presidential campaign.

Edgardo Bentain was later murdered (please watch the reenactment- http://www.gmanews.tv/video/42034/Case-Unclosed-Ang-pagkawala-ni-Edgar-Bentain) !

This is from a Senate hearing on 17 August 2001 into the activities of Ping Lacson:

... He then related how the PAOCTF men abducted Pagcor employee Edgar Bentain and said he saw Bentain alive immersed with cement inside a drum...He identified ousted president Joseph Estrada’s son, JudeEstrada, as having given a black bag, which he said had contained money, to Aquino purportedly as payment for the killing of Bentain.

“The case can open a wider horizon,” former Sec.Raul Gonzalez said, referring to the other celebrated murder case of “Edgardo Bentain”, which all happened during the Estrada administration when Sen.Ping Lacson was the Philippine National Police chief and concurrent head of the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force.

Mancao named Lacson as the one who gave the order to liquidate Dacer. He also mentioned in his affidavit a codename “Bigote,” allegedly referring to Estrada.

Raul Gonzalez said he knows everything about the case as he started it and has in his possession the affidavits of the two suspects, former police Senior Supts. Cezar Mancao II and Glenn Dumlao, and all pieces of evidence that are vital to the solution of the twin murders.

“It’s unfair to Mancao and Dumlao if we will just throw them to the elements,” Gonzalez said, citing the promises he made to the former police officers: “That they will be properly protected, that they will not be left to twist in the wind, that we will not leave them to their own device.”

Gonzalez said he would not hesitate to quit his new post and “offer myself as lawyer for Mancao and Dumlao if this case will not be handled well, not because of the incompetence of the prosecutors but for other reasons.”

Mancao is already in the country. He executed an affidavit last February linking Sen. Panfilo Lacson and former President Joseph Estrada to the murders of publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito almost nine years ago.