Top NPA leaders live it up from extortion: military
Agence France-Presse | 06/24/2009 5:40 PM
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MANILA - Senior leaders of the Philippines' long-running Maoist insurgency extort money from local businesses and sexually exploit their female subordinates, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
The Philippine Army said the case of Leoncio Pitao, the most prominent New People's Army (NPA) leader in the southern Philippines, was typical of his colleagues of equivalent rank. The allegations could not be independently confirmed.
Citing depositions from former NPA soldiers who have since surrendered, army spokesman Colonel Daniel Lucero said the central committee of the group's mother organization the Communist Party of the Philippines sanctioned Pitao in 2007 for "pocketing party funds."
"Leoncio Pitao pockets an average of five million pesos (100,000 dollars) per quarter extorted from different business establishments in the Davao area, which he embezzles for his personal use," Lucero said in a statement.
Lucero said Pitao also underwent "disciplinary action" in the mid-1990s for sleeping with a married female member of his guerrilla unit.
Early this month, the senior rebel was shot and wounded by a comrade who accused Pitao of sleeping with his wife, Lucero said.
"This account involving a (rebel) leader's sexual opportunism and financial extortion in the guise of revolutionary taxation is not an aberration but a widespread practice among leaders of this communist terrorist group," Lucero alleged.
The 5,000-member NPA has been waging a low-level armed rebellion since 1969.
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