Philippine Official Buried; Cardinal Calls for Action

Jaime Ferrer, the first Philippine Cabinet member ever assassinated, was buried Saturday and the nation’s Roman Catholic leader, Cardinal Jaime Sin, demanded at the funeral that there be a speedy solution to the killing.

President Corazon Aquino was among the mourners.

The murder of Ferrer, the local governments secretary and a fervent anti-Communist, was among a string of unsolved bombings, kidnapings and killings in this increasingly violent land.

Soldier Slain

The burial came a day after attackers killed a soldier in the capital area and hurled a grenade at the home of a business leader in Cebu.

On Saturday, the military also reported a mass kidnaping the previous night of 15 students and a professor on Mindanao Island in an area plagued by Muslim insurgency, armed criminal gangs and vendetta killings.

A military honor guard fired a 21-gun salute as the casket bearing Ferrer’s body was placed in a crypt after a three-mile procession from St. Andrew’s Church in suburban Paranaque.

Ferrer, 70, and his driver were shot dead last Sunday after leaving services at St. Andrew’s.

Aging veterans of the “Hunters,” a guerrilla unit Ferrer helped organize to fight the Japanese in World War II, marched under a blazing sun as a flatbed truck decorated with white daisies and two Philippine flags bore Ferrer’s casket to the tomb.

At services before the procession, Sin, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Manila, said the government must quickly identify Ferrer’s killers and bring them to justice or “he would have died in vain.”

“This is the task that the officialdom must address,” said the cardinal, whose own residence was the target of a grenade attack last month.

Brig. Gen. Alexander Aguirre, Manila area commander, told reporters Saturday that no significant leads had surfaced in the Ferrer case, though several people had been questioned, including a suspected Communist sympathizer.