SENATOR Richard Gordon yesterday vowed to start a Senate inquiry into the killing of an Agriculture official who had testified on the P728-million fertilizer fund mess last year.

“It is grossly alarming… [that another official] is once again silenced permanently,” said Gordon, chairman of the Blue Ribbon committee.

Agriculture Undersecretary Gomersindo Lasam, 63, was shot dead by two men riding pillion on a motorcycle as he was driving to his farm in Solana town in Cagayan on Tuesday.

Lasam had testified before the Blue Ribbon committee on the P728 million allocated supposedly to buy fertilizer for farmers, but which allegedly had been funneled to President Arroyo’s campaign fund.

Gordon said he would like to find out if Lasam’s killing was connected to the fund mess, adding he was not the first Agriculture official with knowledge of the controversial fund to be killed, and apparently by assassins.

In 2005 Marlene Esperat, a journalist, was murdered in her home in Tacurong City, Sultan Kudarat. She had been looking into the alleged irregularities in the purchase and distribution of fertilizers by the Agriculture Department.

Teofilo Mojica, a minor official in the department’s administrative office, was also gunned down in his home. He was said to possess incriminating documentary evidence on the fertilizer fraud at the time he was killed.

In l989 Geronimo Provido, director of the department’s Central Mindanao office, was gunned down after he had reported that some Agriculture officials in the region had bought overpriced seeds.

Lasam, the department’s director for Cagayan Valley, was crossing the National Irrigation Administration Bridge in Basi West village when the gunmen shot him around 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, provincial police Chief Roberto Damian said.

Lasam was hit in the neck and left thigh and was pronounced dead at 9 a.m. at the St. Paul University Hospital in Tuguegarao City, Damian said.

He said Lasam had probably decided to drop by his farm before going to his office in Tuguegarao City, which was six kilometers away. Fel V. Maragay