THE human rights group Karapatan has included in its "death list" 635 unexplained killings, the reason it came up with a bloated figure of 836 cases of extrajudicial killings, the PNP Task Force Usig said yesterday.

Karapatan is saying it has recorded more than 800 cases of political killings since President Arroyo assumed power in 2001. The PNP’s Task Usig, which Arroyo created in 2006 to look into the political killings, is saying there are only a little over a hundred.

Director Jefferson Soriano, chief of the PNP directorate for Investigation and Detective Management, said TF Usig which he heads has struck off 635 cases from the list.

He said these cases were "excluded" from Usig’s list as they are outside the task force’s mandate because they were "established to be induced by private motives and not based on work or political affiliations or ideologies."

Of the remaining 201 cases, 79 are still being validated by TF Usig. These 79 cases are being tagged by Leftist groups as state-sanctioned executions, Soriano said in a report to Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno.

The remaining 122 are verified cases of political killings.

On the 57 victims reported by Amnesty International, Soriano said only 23 cases are included in the official Usig list, 27 others have been excluded, and seven others are undergoing verification.

As for the claim by Bayan Muna that 131 of its members have been summarily executed, the task force said only 71 are included in the validated list of the task force while the remaining 68 were excluded. – Raymond Africa