BAGUIO City Broadcasters Club (BCBC) president and veteran journalist Aldwin Quitasol was attacked by yet unidentified assailants on Tuesday, March 1.
Investigation of the incident is underway.
Quitasol, who managed to avoid injury, says that at around ten o’clock in the evening on Tuesday, unidentified assailants on a motorcycle fired at him as he was walking on a dimly-lit road in Quezon Hill.
Quitasol dropped to the ground upon hearing the gunshot, at which point the shooters on the motorcycle riding-in-tandem left the scene.
The Daily Tribune writer Quitasol, who is also a member of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and has previously written for the Northern Dispatch, Interaksyon, and Baguio Chronicle, has previously been red-tagged by the Police Regional Office Cordillera (PROCOR).
Quitasol is a vocal critic of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and the local police’s counterinsurgency strategy, “Dumanon Makitongtong” (Seek and Talk), itself a program under the government’s Oplan Tokhang.
“In April 2018, a widely disseminated police incident report from the Police Regional Office Cordillera on the protest action for Supreme Court Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno identified Quitasol as a CNN (CPP-NPA-NDFP) front group personality, despite his official designation to cover the event,” a joint statement by the NUJP Baguio – Benguet Chapter, BCBC, and Kordilyera Media-Citizen Council said.
Quitasol’s wife and Northern Dispatch editor-in-chief, Kimberlie, is also a victim of online red-tagging and faces a cyberlibel complaint filed by former Police Regional Office Director R’win Pagkalinawan.
Current Baguio City Police Director Colonel Glenn Degawan Lonogan talked to Quitasol and has ordered an investigation of the incident.
An initial investigation of the incident is still underway, with Undersecretary Joel Egco of the Presidential Task Force on Media Security (PTFoMS) saying that the matter must be considered and reported with caution as it is still under investigation.
