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A Quezon City court convicted the couple Benito and Wilma Tiamzon of kidnapping and serious illegal detention.
Section 216 of the Quezon City Regional Court of First Instance found the couple, believed to be senior officials of the Communist Party of the Philippines, guilty of kidnapping and serious illegal detention and sentenced them to life imprisonment or up to 40 years’ imprisonment. prison.
The Tiamzons were also ordered to pay the complainant, Lieutenant Abraham Claro Casis, 75,000 pesos in moral damages; P75,000 as civil compensation; and P75,000 as exemplary damages.
The cases stemmed from a 1988 case in which the communist group held four soldiers captive for about two months. The charges were brought to court in 1990, but the Tiamzons were arrested and prosecuted only in 2014.
They were convicted on the basis of the testimony of Casis, one of the four soldiers allegedly kidnapped and detained by members of the New People’s Army in Quezon province for 75 days.
Casis alleged that he saw the Tiamzons in the detention center where he and his fellow soldiers were being held. He identified the two during the trial. The Tiamzons did not present evidence in their defense and the court said they had not appeared since 2018.
The court believed Casis’s “direct and categorical” testimony despite claims by the Tiamzons’ lawyers that he did not say the two were the ones who captured and guarded the soldiers or arranged for their release.
“From the narration of the facts of the complainant it can be deduced that the present crime was not perpetrated by a single person but by an organization. From the testimony of the complainant, the people who kidnapped him admitted to being members of an organization, the New People’s Army” wrote the judge Alfonso Ruiz II.
The court said that the soldiers’ captors knew what to do and where to go from the moment they were abducted and that the place to which they were taken was prepared and guarded.
“In the present case, the complainant’s testimony succeeded in establishing a conspiracy between members of the group that kidnapped and detained him,” the 19-page ruling states.
The Secretary of Justice, Menardo Guevarra, welcomed the court’s decision.
“I have yet to read the full decision. But it is a victory for the prosecution, so as SOJ I am happy with the outcome of the trial,” he said in a message to reporters.
Meanwhile, the Tiamzons’ lawyers said they would appeal the court’s decision.
Aside from the cases of kidnapping and serious illegal detention, the Tiamzons were also among the defendants in the murder case that resulted from the discovery of a mass grave in Leyte that contained alleged victims of the communist purge during the 1980s. .
The couple were arrested in 2014 in Barangay Zaragoza in Aloguinsan, Cebu by joint forces of the police and the army.
The Tiamzons were released in August 2016 to join the peace negotiations and participate as consultants to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the political wing of the CPP.
In 2017, the couple even met with President Rodrigo Duterte in Malacañang.
In 2018, Section 32 of the Manila Regional Court of First Instance ordered the two to be arrested again, but they have not been taken into custody since. –KBK, GMA News
