Netizens do not seem to forget the fretful event which claimed the lives of Hong Kong tourists after a 90-minute gun battle in Manila crisis.
Half-decade and a year later, the Manila crisis is still fresh in the minds of the Filipinos who witnessed and watched every progress of what thought to be only in the movies but happened in real life.
August 23, 2010 – the day that almost all Filipinos stood in front of their television sets and nailed their ears on their radio as the former policeman Rolando Mendoza took over a bus where Hong Kong tourist were on-board.
The Manila hostage crisis, officially known as the Rizal Park hostage-taking incident, occurred when a disgruntled former PNP officer, Mendoza, hijacked a tourist bus in Rizal Park, Manila.
The bus carried 25 people: 20 tourists, a tour guide from Hong Kong, and four local Filipinos. Mendoza claimed that he had been unfairly dismissed from his job, and demanded a fair hearing to defend himself.
Six years later, the netizens do not seem to forget the fretful event which claimed eight tourists’ lives and of the perpetrator himself after a 90-minute gun battle.
The social media is in a ‘mixed emotion’ mode where netizens post pictures of the hijacked tourist bus – with holes and broken glass all over it – with captions which express grief while some just wish the souls of the victims rest in peace.
The Philippine and Hong Kong governments conducted separate investigations into the incident. Both inquiries concluded that the Philippine officials’ poor handling of the situation caused the eight hostages’ deaths.
The assault mounted by the Manila Police District (MPD), and the resulting shoot-out, have been widely criticized by pundits as “bungled” and “incompetent”, and the Hong Kong Government has issued a “black” travel alert for the Philippines as a result of the affair.