CAMP Macabulos, Tarlac City -- After some months of hiding, two quarry contractors who were charged with attempted murder were arrested by operatives of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Team Monday morning at the office of Gablen Transport Services in Paniqui, Tarlac.

CIDT provincial officer Chief Insp. Richard Caballero identified the arrested suspects as Arsenio Apaga and Benilda Bello, both of Moncada town, who tried to kill Bernard Brian Arcinas in an isolated sugarcane field in Bgy. Caturay, Gerona, last October.

The two suspects were nabbed by the CIDT arresting group led by PO2 Alfredo Bartolome Santos and SPO2 Martin Santiago Apaga armed by an arrest warrant issued by Judge Magdalena Balderama of the Regional Trial Court Branch 65.

Report said that Arcinas was forcibly brought by Apaga and Bello, together with their unidentified cohort who was armed with a gun, to a secluded sugar plantation where he was stabbed with a Rambo-type dagger but apparently “escaped death” as he managed to free himself from his assailants.

Arcinas was repeatedly fired upon by the third suspect as he ran into the fully grown sugarcane.

He said that Bello earlier texted him to go to their (Gablen) office for them to pay the rental due the trucks hired by the suspects from his (Arcinas’) family.

However, Arcinas said that upon reaching the suspects’ office, he was allegedly forced by the three suspects to board a red Revo (PQG 925) and drove him somewhere in Amacalan, Gerona, then to Pura town, before he was brought to a secluded sugarcane plantation in Bgy. Caturay.    

He said he was repeatedly boxed on the right side of his abdomen by the third suspect while on board the vehicle.

In the Medico-Legal certificate, Arcinas apparently sustained a four-inch wound in the left arm, apparently caused by the stabbing and a laceration on his right-rib section. 

Arcinas said the suspects are supplier-contractors of quarry materials of GE Manalo Construction which supplies earth materials to the ongoing Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway who used to rent six dump trucks of the Arcinas family.