‘Only De Lima to benefit from silencing of inmates’

MANILA, Philippines – With the riot breaking out at the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) that left one inmate dead and four others wounded yesterday, Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II said there was an apparent attempt to silence a primary witness.

A high-profile Chinese drug lord was killed and four other inmates were injured in the riot, including Jaybee Sebastian, a prison leader being asked by officials to testify in the congressional investigation against Sen. Leila de Lima.

The melee in the NBP occurred amid a congressional investigation into the drug trade within the prison facility.

Aguirre, who has administrative supervision over Bureau of Corrections and the NBP, immediately ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to probe the incident.

Aguirre vowed to look deeper into the incident – especially after Sebastian’s lawyer claimed the attack on him was unprovoked.

“This is not good for the government. We want Jaybee Sebastian to live because we’re relying on him to spill the beans on Senator De Lima. So we don’t want him to die, we want him to live of course,” he stressed.

“De Lima will certainly benefit if Jaybee is killed,” Aguirre pointed out.

He said Sebastian would be “more valuable to us alive than dead.”

For this reason, Aguirre said he plans to take necessary precautions to secure Sebastian.

“If he has to be separated or isolated from Building 14, we will do so. We could even send him to some penal farms. We will have some plans for him even before he gets out of the hospital,” he said.

On the other hand, a lawyer of Sebastian said they would move for the transfer of the inmate from the Muntinlupa Medical Center to the more exclusive Asian Hospital.

Aguirre said over the weekend that Sebastian was set to testify in the House of Representatives inquiry on illegal drugs trade in NBP.

But on Monday, Aguirre said the inmate would no longer be presented after he refused to spill the beans on his reported role as alleged collector of De Lima of drug money from gang leaders to contribute to her campaign kitty. 

Aguirre again denied the administration was coercing Sebastian and other inmates to testify against De Lima. 

De Lima, a former justice secretary, has said Sebastian was a tipster who gave her department information that led to a 2014 raid of the penitentiary. The raid exposed how high-profile convicts lived in air-conditioned huts equipped with hot tubs and disco lights. Guns, counting machines, cellphones and other gadgets were confiscated.

As former head of the Commission on Human Rights, De Lima earned President Duterte’s ire for investigating his alleged links to death squads in Davao City where he was then mayor for two decades.

She also recently led a Senate investigation into Duterte’s anti-drug war that has left more than 3,000 suspected drug pushers and users dead.

Duterte has accused De Lima of collecting money from the illegal drug trade operated by drug lords from the penitentiary – a charge De Lima calls “lies.”

Oriental Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali, chairman of the House committee on justice investigating the illegal drug trade at the NBP, said the hearing would resume on Oct. 5-7 even without the testimony of Sebastian.

“We have already issued our invitation to him. I don’t know his condition right now. We will proceed minus him if he (Sebastian) cannot make it,” he said.

Congressional leaders want to know how drugs were managed to be sneaked into the NBP despite assurances by the police Special Action Force (SAF) that the prison facility has been freed of contraband, which includes illegal drugs that are the subject of inquiry.

“During our last hearing, the PNP-SAF said they have neutralized this to some extent. That’s why I am now surprised to hear the news that shabu still remains available among inmates,” Umali said.

“These substances are strictly prohibited. It seems NBP is indeed very hard to manage despite the presence of SAF, but there are still drugs, ” he said.

Umali though refused to comment on how the NBP riot came about since only the jail guards of the Bureau of Corrections, along with SAF personnel, have an idea how things are going inside the penitentiary.

Doubts

For her part, De Lima expressed doubts that a riot occurred at the NBP. She claimed this was more of a deadly attempt to pressure high-profile convicts to make false testimonies against her on her alleged involvement in the drug trade in the NBP.

“Absent any other available reliable information, I am not discounting the fact that this is another way of the government persuading the Bilibid 19 to testify against me, and that this incident should serve as a lesson to those who refuse to cooperate with the government and do Aguirre’s and Malacañang’s bidding,” De Lima said.

Bilibid 19 refers to 19 convicts allegedly involved in illegal drugs at the NBP that De Lima had isolated when she was justice secretary.

“If this is the case, this means we have reached a new level of murderous policy in this government… as part of Aguirre’s and Malacañang’s teleserye drama projecting me as the Bilibid Drug Queen,” she said, referring to the ongoing House investigation.

De Lima pleaded to Malacañang to stop what she called “tragic, desperate and despicable actions” against the inmates who are supposed to be under the government’s protection.

To threaten the convicts with violence and murder simply because they refuse to be used in the ongoing House hearing “is the height of Mafia tactics and gangster-style operations that makes this government worse than a narco-state,” she said.

“It makes this government an assassin-state, a state that promotes murder and summary execution as policy and as weapon against its perceived enemies,” De Lima said.

She read to reporters text messages on Sept. 21 to 22, forwarded to her by “an A-1 source,” coming from the wife of Sebastian, indicating the convict was close to succumbing to pressure and tag her as involved in the drug trade. 

Another text message from Sebastian’s wife stated the couple’s bank accounts were being investigated.

She also said the authorities were insulting the intelligence of Filipinos when they peddled the story that Sebastian and the other convicts were engaged in a shabu session in Building 14 when the riot broke out. – With Paolo Romero, Delon Porcalla, Perseus Echeminada, AP