Leila, a credible witness?
The late Atty. Jude Sabio recanted and withdrew his complaint before the ICC, claiming it was part of a political machination against Duterte.
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The late Atty. Jude Sabio recanted and withdrew his complaint before the ICC, claiming it was part of a political machination against Duterte.
Leila de Lima is out on bail, and her first statement was, "The day of reckoning has come."
That was, of course, addressed to citizen Rodrigo R. Duterte, whom she stoically believes organized the Davao Death Squads.
In an interview a few days after her temporary liberty, De Lima recalled that in 2009, when she was chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, she conducted a probe into the alleged extrajudicial killings carried out by the DDS.
She bannered that hundreds of EJK victims were buried in an abandoned Davao quarry.
The event was well-chronicled, and the accounts included her story that she selected the members of her probe team from the national headquarters of the PNP, NBI, and CIDG and not from the Davao regional offices of those agencies.
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Audaciously, she reasoned out that the local personnel of those agencies were intimidated by Duterte's DDS.
She did the same with the courts. She filed her complaint against Duterte in a Regional Trial Court in Manila instead of Davao City, supposedly because Mayor Duterte could influence Davao judges.
Curiously, while she was raving madly against the former president, she skipped the fact that the complaint she filed was dismissed because the badly deteriorated skeletal remains she presented as evidence to pin Duterte were inadmissible in court.
It is a fact that De Lima, who is also best remembered for her classic style of admitting some indiscretions as the "frailties of a woman," haunted Duterte for 13 years.
In 2016, she made it to the Senate and lost no time in having the EJK issue heard by the Blue Ribbon Committee chaired by Sen. Dick Gordon. She and Sen. Antonio Trillanes presented a certain Edgar Matobato as their star witness.
Matobato, who claimed to have been a member of the DDS, testified that he personally buried 200 to 300 EJK victims in the Laud quarry, according to a story by Rappler. Quoting Arturo Lascañas, whom Rappler described as a DDS handler, thousands of EJK victims were supposedly buried in the area. Rappler believed the fairy tale.
These so-called "confessions" formed part of the information that the late Atty. Jude Sabio submitted to the International Criminal Court.
With all these narratives that former CHR chair turned Justice secretary, turned senator, turned prisoner-on-bail Leila de Lima had in her locker, she now warns her pet peeve former mayor and former president Rodrigo Duterte that "the day of reckoning has come" and that she is willing to testify against him before the ICC.
Will De Lima then be a credible witness? Is PRRD scared of her threats?
Again, her claims are incontrovertible facts.
The DDS was a creation of then-Davao Integrated National Police Director, Col. Dionisio Tan-Gatue Jr. The phantom force was part of the psychological warfare against the NPA Sparrows liquidation squad. Duterte, at the time, was an assistant city fiscal.
If there were thousands of EJK victims buried in a small, abandoned quarry, why wasn't De Lima, through all the 13 years she was in power, not able to produce a single piece of viable evidence?
Witnesses Matobato and Lascañas were declared perjured witnesses by the Blue Ribbon Committee. The two then fled the country.
The late Atty. Jude Sabio recanted and withdrew his complaint before the ICC, claiming it was part of a political machination against Duterte.
No wonder that now citizen Duterte just shrugged off her rants. On the other hand, you be the judge.
