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Prosecutors charged only eight of the 48 other suspects in the Maguindanao massacre included in a second wave of complaints filed with the Justice Department, a lawyer for the victims’ families said Monday.
Lawyer Nena Santos said two Ampatuanos and six other people were charged before section 221 of the Quezon City Regional Court of First Instance, the same court that last year found several members of the influential Ampatuan clan and many police officers guilty of multiple murders during the 2009 massacre.
In the second wave of complaints, the DOJ dismissed the charges against 40 respondents. Santos expressed his dismay at this fact and said that only three paragraphs of the prosecutors’ resolution explained the legal basis for the dismissal.
“The fight is not over yet,” Santos said Monday.
Exactly 11 years ago, on November 23, 2009, around a hundred armed men kidnapped the wife, sisters, relatives and supporters of the candidate for governor of Maguindanao, Esmael Mangudadatu, who were on their way to present their candidacy, forced them to climb a remote hill and shot them with high powered guns.
58 people died, 32 of them members of the media who had accompanied the Mangudadatu camp to cover the presentation of the candidacy. Six of the victims were not part of the convoy at all.
Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes convicted dozens of people, including former Datu Mayor Unsay Andal Ampatuan Jr., former Governor of the Muslim Mindanao Autonomous Region Zaldy Ampatuan, Anwar Ampatuan Sr., Anwar “Ipi” Ampatuan Jr. and Anwar Sajid “Ulo” Ampatuan. , and several policemen, in December 2019.
They were convicted of multiple murders for the massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao in 2009, which is known as an unprecedented case of election-related violence and an exceptionally brutal attack on the press.
Along with Manny, Mohades and Misuari Ampatuan, several policemen and other personalities, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, or up to 40 years in prison, without parole.
Fourteen police officers and Bong Andal, who operated the backhoe in the infamous massacre, were sentenced to between six and ten years in prison after it was discovered that they had acted as accomplices in the crime.
The Andal Sr. clan patriarch was also among the defendants, but died of liver cancer while in custody in 2015.
Meanwhile, four Ampatuans – Akmad aka “Tato”, Sajid Islam, Jonathan, Jimmy – along with dozens of other people were acquitted on grounds of reasonable doubt; three were acquitted for the “absolute” failure of the prosecution to prove their guilt. They have been ordered released from jail unless they are detained for other legal reasons.
In her 761-page decision, the judge also ordered the main defendant to pay hundreds of thousands to millions of pesos in damages and loss of earning power to the heirs of each of the victims – except for photojournalist Reynaldo “Bebot” Momay, Massacre Victim number 58 whose body was never found.
The court acquitted all defendants in Momay’s death due to reasonable doubts and dismissed his family’s claim for damages.
However, convictions are appealable to the Supreme Court. The case is now in the Court of Appeals.
Many of the accused remain at large. —KG, GMA News
