The television was on. Andrea Guarniero, 49, sat with his Filipina wife, Cyril, their nine-year-old son and two sisters-in-law at his home in Dauin, a town on the island of Negros, when two gunmen came through the door. They shot him twice in the head. They left on a motorcycle. He was confirmed dead at a nearby hospital.
That was March 28, 2019. Nobody has been charged.
A man who started over
Guarniero came from Padua. According to Il Gazzettino, the Veneto daily, he had been a youth rugby champion in Italy and spent years running the Multichimica company in Mestrino before leaving it all in 2014 for a new life in the Philippines, where he married a local woman. He went into real estate and bought land to build a resort facing the reef. PLN Media, which covered the case at the time, added that he had been part of plans for a luxury hotel with a business partner from Padua, and that locals knew him for medical and humanitarian help to poor residents of the town.
No theft, no arrests, one early theory
Nothing was stolen in the raid, PLN Media reported, and police suggested a business dispute might lie behind it. His brother Daniele was less guarded. “It was an execution,” he said after the killing. “Perhaps the recent purchase of some land had bothered someone. It was not a common crime.”
On May 20, 2019, the family’s lawyer, Rafael Orillana, announced a reward of one million pesos for information leading to the killers. It would be paid, he said, “upon final verification and confirmation by competent authorities.” The Italian Embassy in Manila and Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were following the police investigation closely, PLN Media said. Even then, no arrests had been made.
Seven years on
In March 2026, on the eve of the anniversary, Daniele Guarniero broke a long silence with Il Gazzettino. Of the case, he said: “A wound still open. Impossible to heal.” He told the paper he believes his brother’s wife is responsible, and that money was behind it. He offered no proof in the interview. By his own account, she has never been officially named a suspect as the person who ordered the killing, and investigators questioned her several times without anything emerging. In the Philippines, he noted, a case built on circumstantial evidence needs overwhelming proof. “You have to find the smoking gun,” he said. That has not happened.
He says he has spent tens of thousands of euros on lawyers and investigators, and that several of the lawyers vanished along the way. He has not seen his nephew in years; the boy turns sixteen in April. Daniele has never traveled to the Philippines, before or after the killing. “If a thing like this had happened in Europe,” he said, “the investigations would have gone very differently.”
Sources
- Wife offers cash reward to find killers of Italian murdered in Negros Oriental | PLN Media
- Daniele Guarniero: «Mio fratello Andrea ucciso 7 anni fa dai sicari nelle Filippine. E io ora accuso sua moglie»
