Surrender terms

A rather lazy news day on Sunday erupted into frenzied efforts by members of the Fourth Estate to hustle to cover the sudden decision by Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KoJC) leader Pastor Apollo Quiboloy to surrender after months of hiding.

From Davao City, where he was taken away from the sprawling KoJC compound in a nine-vehicle convoy, past the 2,000 police officers barricading the same since 24 August, Quiboloy would be whisked away to Metro Manila aboard an Air Force C-130 plane.

Quiboloy and some of his fellow arrestees were hustled by their police and military escorts from Villamor Airbase to Camp Crame, headquarters of the Philippine National Police (PNP), to undergo the booking process.

After a medical checkup, Quiboloy was read his rights and the charges against him (including sexual abuse of children and human trafficking), fingerprinted, and had his mug shot taken — certainly a process unbefitting of the self-proclaimed son of God. But was it?

For some KoJC members, Quiboloy suffering the same humiliating experience that every person arrested must face mimicked Christ’s own. Religious freedom allows KoJC members to make that claim, along the lines of their shepherd bearing his own cross, as an alleged victim of political persecution.

Rather triumphantly, the PNP, through its spokesperson, the amiable but sometimes testy Col. Jean Fajardo, said Quiboloy surrendered after he was given an ultimatum to give up within 24 hours or face a phalanx of storm troopers forcibly entering a building in the KoJC compound the police had been barred from for weeks. Therein lies the big question we are reserving for later.

The pastor, as details would later show, turned himself in mainly to members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Intelligence Service, with those similarly facing arrest warrants in Jackielyn Roy, Ingrid Canada, Crisente Canada, and Sylvia Cemañes in tow.

But Quiboloy’s camp had an altogether different take on his surrender, claiming that he decided to do so to stop the “lawless violence” at the KoJC compound that Davao police chief Brig. Gen. Nicolas Torre III had allegedly turned into a police garrison.

“He (Quiboloy) could not bear to witness a second longer the sufferings that his flock was experiencing for many days,” the KoJC leader’s lawyer, Israelito Torreon, claimed. “He did not want the lawless violence to continue.”

And no, Quiboloy was not hiding, according to his counsel, who reckoned the pastor was just “out of reach for a number of days” because he was awaiting the “positive results” of the legal remedies his lawyers had availed of.

Torre and his men, according to the lawyer, used the arrest warrants against Quiboloy as a license to desecrate the KoJC cathedral and turn the Jose Maria College school into a “mining pit.”

As Quiboloy and his co-accused are now under the jurisdiction of the court that would try them, so must the alleged police violations of the legal procedures in serving the arrest warrants be looked into by the government agencies concerned.

Curiously, the PNP claimed Quiboloy gave up following the ultimatum the police would force their way into the building they had been barred entry to previously by KoJC members. If so, it must be asked why that ultimatum was not issued much earlier or at the first instance when the police were stopped from entering that particular building.

There’s no belaboring the point that if KoJC members were especially keen on preventing the police from entering that building, then Quiboloy must certainly have been hiding there. Had that been done, thousands of man-hours of those 2,000 cops deployed in the compound would not have gone to waste.

No, there’s no saying hindsight is almost always crystal clear because amid all the diggings and the hunt for the elusive heartbeat using special equipment, the police could not have acted like they had the luxury of time to wait for the “son of God” to give himself up.

Whichever terms of surrender may be accurate, the P10-million bounty for anyone providing information leading to Quiboloy’s arrest may have been forfeited.