The botched handling of the hostage drama in Manila has been widely criticised, not least by Filipinos themselves, and an investigation is supposedly in train to find out what went wrong, although much of it was pretty evident to anyone watching television.
The so-called SWAT team seemed baffled much of the time, with no tactics other than to scurry around in a crouched position from one end of the tour bus to the other. The assault on the bus took an hour, marked by such feeble efforts as a lone policeman swinging a sledgehammer at a bus window.
There seems little doubt that the eight Hong Kong tourists who perished need not have died were it not for the incompetence of the police, who provoked the hijacker - former senior inspector Rolando Mendoza - by arresting and manhandling his brother, also a police officer, in public.
To add insult to injury, aides of Philippine President Benigno Aquino refused to put repeated calls made by Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen through to him.
Later, one of his assistants said the president was too busy directing operations to take the call, only to be contradicted by Aquino himself, who said his policy was 'to let the ground commanders who are the experts in this field handle the operation with minimal interference from people who are less expert'.
After Tsang held a press conference and said he had been unable to speak to Aquino, the Philippine leader said nobody had told him about it. It turned out that Aquino had told his staff that he would not take any call unless it was extremely important. Tsang's call was, evidently, not considered important enough, even as his constituents were the ones whose lives were in danger.
Now, we are told, the staff members did not recognise the name 'Donald Tsang' and did not know he was the Hong Kong leader.
