Dacer daughters buck house arrest, Senate custody for Ping

MANILA, Philippines - The daughters of slain publicist Salvador Dacer do not approve of the proposal to allow Sen. Panfilo Lacson, the accused mastermind in the killing of their father and his driver Emmanuel Corbito in November 2000, to be placed under the custody of the Senate or under house arrest once caught, their lawyer said yesterday.

Demetrio Custodio, legal counsel of the Dacer sisters who filed the double murder case against Lacson in March last year, told reporters at the Department of Justice that his clients would want to see the fugitive senator face trial in court while in jail.

He said the Dacers are against the plan of the Senate to be allowed to gain custody of Lacson as earlier revealed by his close friend and former classmate, Sen. Gregorio Honasan.

“The offense for which Sen. Lacson is charged does not allow for Senate custody since the penalty is more than six years. No one is above the law and Sen. Lacson should not be an exception,” Custodio explained.

The lawyer cited for example the case of Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, who remains in jail despite his election in 2007 due to coup d’ état case filed against him for his role in the July 2003 Oakwood mutiny.

“Why should Sen. Lacson be different?” he said.

He said his clients also oppose the suggestion to have Lacson placed under house arrest should he decide to surrender and face trial.

“Any surrender should be unconditional. In any case, it is not up to us. It is up to the court to decide his fate,” Custodio stressed.

The statement of Dacer’s daughters - Carina, Sabina, Emily and Amparo - came after the Department of Foreign Affairs cancelled the passport of Sen. Lacson to help in the government’s intensified bid to arrest him upon an earlier order of a Manila trial court hearing the double murder case.

Now based in the US, all four alleged in their nine-page affidavit of complaint filed on March 27 last year before the consul generals in New York and California that it was Lacson who “ordered the killing of our father” based on a recent testimony of former senior superintendent Cezar Mancao II, one of the suspects in the double murder case who turned witness for the prosecution.

“Senator Lacson not only conspired with the accused in the murders of our father and Mr. Corbito but in fact orchestrated the same. Being then the head of the PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force), he exercised ascendancy over all members of the task force, particularly those who executed the killings,” stated the complaint obtained by The STAR.

“To be sure, the acts of PAOCTF personnel involved before, during and after the gruesome killing of our father and Mr. Corbito could have only been done upon the direction of Sen. Lacson,” the Dacer siblings added.

Because of this, they said Lacson should also be held liable for violation of Presidential Decree 1829 for allegedly moving to hide the truth behind the double murder by instructing the suspects to hide in the USA and supposedly meeting with them several times there.

They said they believe in the testimony of Mancao, saying the senator possibly had the motive.

“Sen. Lacson has an axe to grind, so to speak, against our father. Our father strongly opposed Sen. Lacson’s appointment as chief of the Philippine National Police during the Estrada administration. Our father had repeatedly told us a few months before his disappearance on Nov. 24, 2000 that if something happened to him, there should be no one else to blame but Sen. Lacson,” they recalled.