LAWYERS of the Free Legal Assistance Group
(FLAG) on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to take protective
custody of brothers Raymond and Reynaldo Manalo who were
allegedly detained and tortured by the Civilian Armed Force
Geographical Unit (Cafgu), with the complicity of the military,
for 18 months on suspicion that they were members of the New
People’s Army.
In a petition for prohibition, FLAG lawyers
Jose Manuel Diokno, Theodore Te and Ricardo Sunga asked the SC
to issue a temporary restraining order and a writ of injunction
enjoining the Defense Secretary and the Armed Forces chief of
staff from causing the arrest or enforced disappearance of the
Manalos.
The FLAG lawyers also asked the SC to
designate an incumbent or retired justice to act as a
commissioner and to verify their allegations, taking cognizance
of the constitutional provision authorizing the judiciary to
promulgate rules for the protection of civil rights.
The Manalos’ lawyers said their clients fear
both the AFP and the PNP and trust no other agency except the
SC.
The brothers, both farm workers, claimed they
were abducted on Feb. 14, 2006 in San Ildefonso, Bulacan, taken
to Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija, and blindfolded, beaten,
bathed in their own urine and whipped with a chain with a barbed
wire attached at one end for three months. They alleged that
their captors also poured water in their nostrils, forced them
to eat rotten food and threatened to harm their families if they
later reveal their experience or escape.
The lawyers cited security reasons in
declining to say where the brothers were being kept and for what
reason they were taken by the Cafgus. But they disclosed that
retired Army Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan allegedly talked with
Raymond, when he and his brother were still in captivity, to ask
him to tell his family not to attend the habeas corpus hearings
then pending at the Court of Appeals.
Raymond said in his affidavit that he later
learned the identities of his and his brother’s captors as
Cafgus Michael dela Cruz, a certain Puti and Pula dela Cruz,
Randy and Rudy Mendoza. He also claimed Army Sgt. Rizal Hilario,
posing as a Rollie Castillo, warned him that his family would be
killed if they try to escape.
Raymond also claimed that he saw and talked
with abducted UP students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeno, and
farmer-activist Manuel Mirino at Camp Tecson in Limay, Bataan.
He said he later learned that Mirino had been killed by their
captors.
Last Aug. 13, the Manalo brothers escaped from their
safehouse in Pangasinan after their drunk captors fell asleep.
The brothers said they walked to the highway and boarded a bus
for Cubao. – Evangeline C. de Vera
