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MANILA: The Philippine police do not have an official hostage negotiation team, the officer in charge of talking to the hijacker in a bus siege that ended with eight Hong Kong tourists dead said Monday.
Police Superintendent Orlando Yebra's normal role is as the legal officer of the Manila police district, but when required he acts as the force's chief hostage negotiator, he told an inquiry into the botched rescue.
"I don't have a designation or a title appointing me a negotiator, I just perform this when needed by the situation," he said, explaining that he had been trained in crisis management, include hostage negotiation, in Australia and the US.
"Officially there is no negotiation unit yet in the PNP (national police)," he said. "I proposed for the creation of that already," in 2007, he said, but a detailed proposal he submitted was not followed up.
During the day-long siege last month he was given no intelligence support, he said, with only one officer backing him up and neither of them having a complete picture of the hostage-taking even hours after the crisis began.
Yebra said that the national police had supposedly assigned him several men taken from other units, but they never contacted him.
"If there was an intelligence team working the area... (its presence) was not properly advised to me," he said.
"That (intelligence team) would have been crucial to the success of the operation.
"It is from this group that I can get other information... the background of the hostages, the structure of the bus and probably how much litres of fuel were left in the tank," Yebra said.
He said a police psychologist could have helped him assess the state of mind of ex-police officer Rolando Mendoza when he hijacked the bus with 22 Hong Kong tourists and three Filipinos aboard on August 23.
The visitors were on the last day of a sight-seeing tour of Manila when Mendoza hijacked their bus and held them hostage for about 12 hours, in a bid to be cleared of extortion charges and regain his job.
In a bloody end to the siege eight of the foreigners were killed during a botched rescue seen live on television.
Yebra's testimony provided the latest in a list of errors during the operation.
City and police officials who earlier appeared before the inquiry admitted to other lapses, including leaving their posts when the gunman began shooting and not using the force's best-trained commando unit to take part in the assault.
-AFP/wk
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