In the last few months, Armando Rosimo had become a symbol of hope in the Philippines, a fearless government investigator leading a series of inquiries into the pervasive tax evasion, corruption and fraud by wealthy families and big businesses that have crippled this nation's finances for decades.
But as Rosimo drove his Honda Civic out the front gate of his home on the morning of Oct. 16, a man waiting just outside with a pistol fired two .45-caliber bullets into his head, killing him, the Philippine National Police reported.
The gunman and five accomplices, who had been serving as lookouts, yanked open the car's doors, checked to make sure Rosimo was dead, then commandeered a passing van and disappeared, said Colonel Don Montenegro, the senior police superintendent investigating the case.
The assassination, which came less than two months after a less senior tax official was killed in the central Philippines, was a serious blow to a country struggling to cope with chronic budget deficits.
Weak tax revenues have paralyzed the government's ability to pay for problems ranging from insolvent banks to armed insurgencies to a poorly trained and equipped military.
Rosimo's death "is quite significant" because improving tax collection will now be harder, said Adam Le Mesurier, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs specializing in Southeast Asia, adding, "I'm not sure the next person is going to be as eager."
Scott Harrison, the managing director of Pacific Strategies and Assessments, a risk consulting firm here, said it was difficult to create the political will to address fraud and tax evasion. Rosimo's death, he said, "is what happens when you try to uncover major wrongdoing."
Julia Heidemann, a government spokeswoman, said that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was determined to persist in improving tax collection.
"The government had declared war against tax fraud," she said.
The killing of Rosimo came as other security threats in the Philippines seemed to have waned.
Many leaders and members of Abu Sayyaf, a small terror and kidnapping group possibly linked to al-Qaeda, have been killed or detained in the southern Philippines by local soldiers helped by US military advisers.
On Oct. 12, Philippine security forces shot and killed Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, an Indonesian fugitive believed to be the top bomb maker for Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian group that Western intelligence officials say they think was behind the Bali bombings last year.
A communist insurgency has been less active in recent weeks, although it continues to extort what it describes as "tax payments" from owners of land and businesses in a few rural areas.
The government also concluded a ceasefire in July with the last big Muslim insurgency group in the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. But Western experts are still concerned about the risk of attacks by Islamic militants.
"Manila is probably the most target-rich environment in Southeast Asia, in terms of Western-style clubs, discos, hotels and symbols of Western culture, such as multinational businesses and fast-food outlets," Robert Hill, Australia's defense minister, warned in a speech on Oct. 9.
The Philippine economy fails to make effective use of one of the best-educated English-speaking populations in Asia. A tenth of the Philippine population has moved overseas, and those left behind depend heavily on money sent by those who left.
As foreign investment poured into the region in the past decade, the Philippines has lost a series of big investments to its more stable and faster-growing rival, Thailand, and it now faces rapidly growing competition from China in the electronics industry, which accounts for three-fifths of Philippine exports.
Government borrowing has sucked up much of the nation's savings, leaving little money for banks to lend to businesses that might invest the money in new factories or other job-creating efforts.
Economists have recommended that the Philippines stabilize the banking system with a partial bailout like the rescue of the US savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, but the government lacks the money.
Rosimo, a widower, had been braver than most here in tackling corruption. The initial police investigation of his killing found that his assailants had been watching his house since June. Montenegro said he had a good idea where to start looking for the killers.
While the possibility remains that the killing was related to love or family, "he was the chief of the tax fraud division," Montenegro said. "We will be looking at the cases he handled in the last two years."
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