TELLING THE FILIPINO STORY TO THE WORLD
By Nancy C. Carvajal
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Philippine Daily Inquirer
(Editors’ Note: For 25 days, we will be telling stories about the Philippine Daily Inquirer to mark the paper’s 25th anniversary on Dec. 9, 2010. Some are little inside stories but impacting on how we cover unfolding events; some are mark-the-day stories that become talk-of-the-town types; others are turning-point stories that have changed the landscape of history; still others, big or small, seize the heart and never let go. But whatever, the Inquirer will tell you the story.)
THE ASSIGNMENT was daunting: Interview a communist assassin and a police torturer.
I was given two weeks to do the two interviews, which were to be my contribution to an Inquirer special report on the so-called “Abadilla 5”—five neighbors in Fairview, Quezon City, whom the police had tortured into confessing to the June 13, 1996, murder of retired Col. Rolando N. Abadilla, a feared military intelligence officer during the Marcos dictatorship.
Refusing to let caution trump ambition, I readily accepted the assignment given by the project head, Jose Ma. Nolasco. The managing editor had assured me and the two other members of the investigative team—Juliet Labog-Javellana and Stella O. Gonzales—that the special report had all the elements of a blockbuster.
The Inquirer stumbled on the Abadilla 5 story in the latter part of 2002, when lawyer Soliman Santos brought to our attention the plight of Lenido Lumanog, one of the five men convicted of killing Abadilla and sentenced to die by lethal injection. Lumanog, then 46, was at the end stage of renal failure, and he needed a kidney transplant fast.
After a series of meetings and discussions of the case, Santos was able to convince our investigative team that the country’s judicial system had perpetrated—beyond reasonable doubt—a grave injustice on Lumanog and his four fellow death convicts. By coming out with a special report on the Abadilla 5, Santos explained, the Inquirer may be able to generate public sympathy and mobilize financial help for Lumanog.
Truth, purpose, action
Our team felt it had the truth, it had purpose and it was ready to act.
Javellana and Gonzales were assigned to interview the members of the Abadilla 5, focusing on how they were tortured by the police and coerced into confessing to the murder. They were also assigned to go over the case records, particularly the physical evidence presented by the prosecution and conflicting accounts of eyewitnesses.
The managing editor explained to me the importance of my assignment.
By interviewing one of Abadilla’s assassins, our team sought to find out how the communist Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB) carried out the killing as it had claimed it did.
By interviewing a police expert on torture, our team hoped to show that the police have not abandoned the martial law practice of forced confessions that, in turn, have led to doubtful convictions and, eventually, to judicial errors.
The art of torture
Finding a police torturer was the easy part. Many police officers love to talk about how they break even the toughest guys.
In my case, I came upon a police senior superintendent who regaled me with tales of torture and various techniques in making suspects talk. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Torture is an art, not a sadist’s game,” the graduate of the Philippine Military Academy in the 1970s said in a three-hour interview over baked ravioli, oysters, steak and iced tea at an Italian restaurant in Makati City.
His favorite method: Inserting a bird’s feather into a suspect’s urethra. “For the first few seconds, the suspect feels a tingling sensation and then comes excruciating pain,” he said. “Do the same thing with the rib of a coconut palm (walis tingting), tap it, and blood comes out.”
The officer confirmed the prevalence of other torture methods described by Amnesty International in its October 2000 report on the case of the Abadilla 5. These included electric shocks, “water cure,” “plastic bag” treatment and beatings.
How will a torturer know whether a suspect is telling the truth or just making up a story to avoid further pain? I asked my source.
Training, experience and a little knowledge in human psychology, the officer replied even as he conceded that “when a certain threshold of pain is reached, a suspect will admit to anything, including the killing of [Dr. Jose] Rizal.”
Encounter with assassin
Then came the hard part—interviewing an ABB gunman.
A top police intelligence official told me where to find my assassin. Traveling on an Inquirer vehicle, I went to the Las Piñas City Jail where I was told my subject was transferred after his brief detention at Camp Crame.
The jail warden, however, told me the person I was looking for had been moved to a remote jail in Silang, Cavite. At the Silang jail, I learned that he had been released after posting bail.
I checked the jail records and found that my would-be source had given his address at Riverside, Dasmariñas, Cavite. For hours, I asked tricycle drivers, bystanders and nearly everyone I met if they knew where I may find this man.
It was nearing dark. Hungry and tired, I told the Inquirer driver, Benjie Labay, that the woman sitting alone on a bench in front of a bakery would be the last person I’d ask.
The woman turned out to be the ABB gunman’s wife. She agreed to bring me to her husband if an ABB higher-up would vouch for me.
Luckily, I had with me the cell phone number of the son of an ABB leader. I called him up and explained my purpose. He told the woman I was OK.
Riverside shanty
From the main road, we entered a narrow alley and, after a short walk, we ended up in front of a shanty beside the river.
A dark, slim man ushered me into the living room, which had a TV set, an electric fan and a wooden bench. The shanty was sparkling clean.
I asked him about Abadilla’s ambush. Without blinking, he said he was part of a five-man ABB team that was assigned to kill Abadilla. A separate team did the surveillance on the target, he said.
He admitted he was the one who shot the dreaded intelligence officer. After the hit on Katipunan Avenue, Quezon City, he said, the members of the team fled on foot and rode a jeepney to Cubao.
I asked him why the task force assigned to solve Abadilla’s killing had refused to accept the ABB’s claim of responsibility despite its statement that it carried out the assassination “to render revolutionary justice to tens of thousands of people who had been victimized by martial rule.”
“To save face,” the ABB gunman said.
Special report
The Inquirer ran a four-part special report on the Abadilla 5 in the second week of December 2002. The series raised serious doubts about the weight and value of the evidence that the prosecution had presented against the accused.
Judge Jaime Salazar of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court found the Abadilla 5 guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the basis of the uncorroborated testimony of a single eyewitness and the confessions that the police extracted from the accused through torture.
This, despite Salazar’s acknowledgement that the ballistics tests showed that none of the guns presented by the prosecution and police in court was used in the killing. None of the fingerprints that were found in Abadilla’s car and the getaway car matched those of the accused. And none of the Abadilla 5 resembled police sketches of the killers, which were based on descriptions of eyewitnesses.
The judge disbelieved the alibis of the Abadilla 5 and discarded the ABB angle. He brushed aside the Abadilla 5’s retracted confessions and their complaints of torture.
The entire judicial process that the Abadilla 5 were subjected to appalled no less than Amnesty International, a London-based group that has won the Nobel Peace Prize for its outstanding defense of human rights all over the world.
After the publication of the Inquirer special report, however, Lumanog was able to get his kidney transplant—thanks to then First Gentleman Mike Arroyo. The special report won several international and local journalism prizes.
The Abadilla 5, however, continue to languish at the National Bilibid Prisons after the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court upheld Salazar’s ruling. The Abadilla 5 has filed a motion for reconsideration in the Supreme Court.
They remain hopeful the country’s justice system would eventually rectify its grave error.
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