As the Alfad family prepares to bury their loved one, the call for answers grows louder. Itโs not only about what happened in Barangay Sinunuc โ itโs about what that tragedy exposes: the rules of engagement, the culture of accountability, and the worth it placed on lives in that police operation. (Image by Facebook/ Aviso Zamboanga)
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines โ When a 12-year-old child ends up dead in a police operation, the question is no longer just what went wrong โ but whether the authorities have allowed something fundamental to go unchecked.
A coalition of lawyers across the ZamBaSulTa region has drawn this line. The lawyers are demanding an independent, transparent investigation into the April 23 joint operation in Barangay Sinunuc. The raid left three members of the Alfad family dead, including a minor, and another teenager critically wounded.
Authorities framed the operation, carried out by elements of the Philippine National Police and the military to serve an arrest warrant, in familiar terms: resistance, self-defense, neutralization. But for the legal community, those words are no longer sufficient โ and perhaps no longer credible without proof.
โA warrant of arrest is not a license to kill,โ the lawyers said in a strongly worded statement, pushing back against what they see as a troubling pattern in high-risk law enforcement operations where lethal force becomes the default narrative.
Dead are Jerry Indan Alfad, 52; Rayyan Hassan Alfad, 22; and 12-year-old Salam Aradais Alfad. Mislie Aradais Alfad, 18, survived but remains in hospital, her condition a stark reminder that this was not a clean, controlled operation โ but one that spiraled into tragedy.
The lawyers are not merely questioning the facts of the case; they are challenging the system that produces these outcomes. In particular, they are calling out the routine invocation of โself-defenseโ โ a legal justification that, they stress, requires more than after-the-fact assertions.
โClaims of self-defense cannot rest on mere verbal accounts. These must be supported by clear and convincing evidence,โ the statement read.
At the heart of their demand is transparency. Operatives reportedly used body-worn cameras, now standard in many operations, during the raid. For the lawyers, these devices could either validate official claims or expose contradictions. But that depends entirely on whether the authorities preserved the footage, untouched, and subjected to independent scrutiny.
โWe call on authorities to ensure that all body-worn camera recordings are secured, remain unedited, and are submitted to independent bodies,โ they said. Their call is a subtle but unmistakable acknowledgment of the publicโs deepening distrust in internal processes.
That distrust underpins the groupโs call for outside oversight, specifically from the Commission on Human Rights, the National Police Commission, and the PNP Internal Affairs Service. For them, accountability cannot come from within the same institutions in question.
โThe operating units cannot investigate themselves. There must be on-site interviews with witnesses and the surviving family members to establish accountability,โ the lawyers said.
Beyond the legal arguments lies a deeper unease: how many more operations like this have unfolded with similar justifications, but without the same level of scrutiny? And how many have ended with civilians โ even children โ caught in the crossfire?
In Zamboanga, a city long shaped by security concerns, the line between enforcement and excess has always been fragile. But incidents like this force a reckoning. They challenge the assumption that safety must come at the cost of civilian lives, and they expose the human toll behind sanitized operational reports.
As the Alfad family prepares to lay their dead to rest, the demand for answers grows louder. Not just for what happened in Barangay Sinunuc โ but for what it reveals about the rules of engagement, the culture of accountability, and the value it placed on lives that should never have been lost in that police operation. (with Ely Dumaboc)
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