Charges of Police Killings Roil Philippines : Scandal: Officers are accused of executing 11 handcuffed prisoners and attempting a cover-up.

With a crime wave intensifying and Manila beginning to resemble an armed camp, the top leadership of the Philippine national police has come under intense criticism following allegations that officers summarily executed 11 handcuffed men accused of bank robbery and then attempted a cover-up.

The nation sat riveted Monday by a televised congressional hearing into the matter attended by three top officers who were forced to take leave after thousands of rank-and-file police officers demanded that the government fire them.

They included Chief Supt. Jewel Canson, head of the National Capital Regional Command, who has been accused of ordering the executions. He has denied the charges.

“You are on trial in the bar of public opinion,” Sen. Raul Roco told the three men during the congressional hearing Monday after they testified that key evidence in the case has “disappeared.”

The scandal stems from the May 18 shooting of 11 men who the police said were members of a gang of bank robbers that has terrorized the capital for the last six months. According to the official police account, officers cornered the men in two vans and fired on them only after the suspects opened fire with automatic weapons.

Vice President Joseph Estrada, who heads a presidential task force aimed at stamping out kidnapings and bank robberies in the capital, caused an uproar when he said the suspects deserved to die.

“These kinds of people don’t deserve sympathy, because they are ruthless,” Estrada said. “They kill with impunity. It’s just right that they are exterminated.”

The police version began to unravel last week when a sergeant assigned to investigate the shootings said the 11 men were handcuffed and in police vans when they were shot systematically. The investigator, Eduardo de los Reyes, said a senior officer asked him to plant weapons around the bodies to lend credence to the police version.

“I want to expose this rottenness,” De los Reyes said.

Among those killed were two brothers, 16 and 20. Their father, who filed a complaint with the Philippine Human Rights Commission alleging that his sons were murdered, said they had come to Manila on a one-week vacation from the southern town of Dipolog.

Manila’s residents are becoming increasingly angry about a rash of violent bank robberies traced to groups that were originally armed and trained by the police for use against Communist insurgents.

With most transactions still carried out in cash, Manila’s banks keep huge amounts of money, which is moved about the city in convoys of armored cars. But the bandits have found that if they pour gasoline on the vehicles and set them ablaze, the guards soon abandon the loot for safety.

There were 14 major bank robberies in the city in the first four months of the year. One result of the violence is that virtually all banks are now guarded by security men with shotguns and M-16 rifles.

The police have until Wednesday to complete an official inquiry into the May 18 shootings. But Congress was told Monday that evidence has already started to disappear.

De los Reyes said he handed in a camera that he had used to photograph the bodies while they were still wearing handcuffs, but police said they could find no trace of it. Also missing was 392,000 pesos that De los Reyes said had been planted in the vans by the police.