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Filipinos Convicted of Killing U.S. Marine in 2012 Are Captured

Maj. George Anikow in Afghanistan in 2009. Mr. Anikow, the husband of an American Embassy employee in the Philippines, was killed in a fight in Manila in late 2012.Credit...Sgt. Pete Thibodeau/United States Marine Corps

MANILA — Two Filipinos convicted in the 2012 killing of a United States Marine have been captured in Manila after years of avoiding prison time, the Philippine government said on Monday.

The two, Galicano Datu and Crispin dela Paz, were seized separately last week by agents of the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation, the agency said.

Its director, Dante Gierran, said the men had been convicted of killing Maj. George Anikow, 41, who was married to an American Embassy employee in Manila. He died after the men brawled in November 2012 in a plush area of the city’s Makati financial district.

Mr. dela Paz was caught last week after a car chase through Manila, Mr. Gierran said. Mr. Datu was found in hiding in a condominium owned by his girlfriend, he added.

“The subjects were deliberately hiding to evade arrest,” Mr. Gierran said.

The United States Embassy said on Monday in a statement that the new arrests had brought “some measure of justice to this senseless crime.”

The killing was among the high-profile cases that helped propel President Rodrigo Duterte to power on a campaign promise of making the Philippines safer. Thousands of Filipinos have since been killed by the police in Mr. Duterte’s drug crackdown.

Mr. Datu and Mr. dela Paz, both from influential families, were convicted of homicide while free on bail, after the charges were downgraded from murder. Even so, they were not sent to prison but were required only to report periodically to penal officers.

Philip Goldberg, then the American ambassador, expressed disappointment at the time that no one had served a day in prison for the crime.

But this spring, the judge who had downgraded the charges was dismissed by the Philippine Supreme Court for gross ignorance of the law, and new arrest warrants were issued for Mr. Datu and Mr. dela Paz.

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