KARAPATAN fully supports the families of victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 2021 as they urged the Congressional Quad committee investigating the killings under Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug war to look into the extrajudicial killings (EJK) of their loved ones and other activists.
Rosenda Lemita, mother of Ana Mariz Lemita-Evangelista and Liezel Asuncion, wife of Manny Asuncion, have written the Quadcom to ask them to include the killings of their family members and other EJK victims in their investigations.
Ana Mariz Lemita-Evangelista was killed with her husband Ariel in their home in Batangas in the early morning of March 7, 2021, when police and military forces conducted a region-wide operation in the provinces of Rizal, Batangas and Cavite. Now referred to as Bloody Sunday, the operations that targeted 24 individuals resulted in the killing of nine activists and the arrest of six others.
Also among the nine killed was Manny Asuncion, a veteran trade union activist who was then serving as the coordinator of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan in Cavite. He was shot dead at the Workers Assistance Center satellite office in Dasmariñas, Cavite after the members of the raiding team forced his wife Liezel out of the building.
Two days before the crackdown, then president Rodrigo Duterte displayed the same braggadocio he often showed in exhorting security forces to kill drug suspects, and infamously ordered the police and the military to “finish off” New People’s Army rebels and ignore human rights.
The victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre, most of them community-based organizers, had all been previously red-tagged, threatened or harassed.
Both Rosenda Lemita and Liezel Asuncion expressed hope that the Quadcom could help ferret out the truth about the Bloody Sunday massacre, the same way the Congressional committee had unearthed details about the Duterte drug war killings.
Mrs. Lemita and Mrs. Asuncion have filed complaints with the United Nations Human Rights Committee after the Department of Justice conducted a sham investigation and exonerated the police and military forces involved in the killings of their loved ones.
*Attached are the letters sent by Rosenda Lemita and Liezel Asuncion to the Quadcom.
