The grand inquisitors in the House of Romualdez who comprise the House Quad Committee have invited former Human Rights Commission chairperson Leila de Lima to the hearing on extrajudicial killings. It may be recalled that in 2009 she, at the behest of the House of Representatives, conducted several months of a probe on the alleged EJKs in Davao City.
She should have been able to tell the story as to who in Congress initiated the move to have the reported EJKs investigated by the CHR. De Lima should have been able to tell all — where she recruited the members of her probe teams from, where and in which court she filed her complaint, applied for search warrants, etcetera, etcetera.
Anyway, to put it briefly, De Lima distrusted every government functionary based in the Davao region so she recruited the members of her probe team from the national headquarters.
Even the warrants were obtained from the Regional Trial Court in Manila because of her fear and allegations that those from Davao were either under the influence of then Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte or were scared of the Davao Death Squad.
I had written about this before and I am wont to write about it again. Since her initial probe on EJKs and the DDS in 2009 to the present, De Lima, who had transitioned from being chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to secretary of Justice to senator, had never ever produced a single piece of evidence that EJKs happened and the DDS existed.
It will be recalled that the CHR probe team even ferreted out a detained murder suspect, a certain Jonathan Balô, from the Panabo City jail without local court clearance and brought him to an abandoned quarry in Maa, Davao City which De Lima claimed was the common burial ground of more than 2,000 EJK victims.
Balo was used as a prop to point out where the victims were buried. The poor guy did not know what was taking place and of course could not point to anything De Lima’s probe team wanted to show.
Fast forward. De Lima won a Senate seat by the skin of her teeth in the 2016 regular elections but so did her pet peeve, Duterte, as president. But that did not deter her from hounding PRRD.
She found an ally in the person of Antonio Trillanes and together they continued with their consuming quest to pin Duterte on the EJK and DDS issues.
They presented as a witness a certain Edgar Matobato who claimed to be a member of the DDS and a policeman, Arturo Lascañas who was said to be his handler.
The former claimed to have executed more than 200 persons and personally buried them in the abandoned quarry. Both were later found to be perjured witnesses. Before they could be charged in court, however, they fled the country.
(To be continued)