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Esperon declassifies AFP report on Burgos case


Armed Forces chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon has declassified the "confidential" military investigation report on the April 28 abduction of agriculturist Jonas Joseph Burgos. "I have declassified the report and so I’m ready to present that (report) to the competent court," Esperon said. The Court of Appeals had earlier ordered the military to disclose the results of its investigation on the Burgos abduction. "I thought that for the sake of upholding and protection of human rights, I might as well declassify this (report) since it has become an issue where it is interpreted as blocking the right of a parent or of an individual to be afforded human rights," Esperon said. Military authorities have maintained that the report, prepared by the AFP Provost Marshal General, took into consideration only the matter of the plate number (TAB 194) of the vehicle used in the Burgos abduction inside a Quezon City mall. The same plate number was later traced to a vehicle impounded inside the headquarters of the Philippine Army’s 56th Infantry Battalion in Norzagaray town in Bulacan sometime June last year. Authorities said the plates got lost when the unit went on retraining between November last year to March this year. Human rights protector In agreeing to declassify the much sought-after report, Esperon said: "We are very strong on that (respect for human rights). We have given out directives on command responsibility and so this is one of our ways to show that indeed that the Armed Forces of the Philippines is a protector of human rights." Esperon said that the investigation surrounding the actual abduction of Burgos rests with the National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detective Group (CIDG). "Our investigation into the case was simply to find out how the plate number got lost. We confined our investigation to that because there was an ongoing investigation on the criminal aspect of the case," he said. On how the plates got into the hands of the kidnappers, Esperon said: "We do not know how it got into the scene, how it got involved in the commission of the abduction but what we found out is that there was a succession of custodians, supposed to be custodians who failed to exercise their duty." Nonetheless, Esperon said that while he is not entirely ruling out possibilities that the Burgos could have involved military personnel, he remained steadfast that "we are not involved in the abduction." To prove his point, Esperon claimed that even before the Supreme Court issued the guidelines for the implementation of the writ of amparo, military operatives have been looking for Burgos, son of the late press freedom fighter Jose "Joe" Burgos. "By all means, the writ of amparo requires us to do more than just deny that he is with us and he is indeed not with us. The writ of amparo would require us to take steps to find out where he is and we can comply with that, as we have done, we have been looking for him also," he said. - GMANews.TV

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