CA upholds DOJ decision to indict Armscor execs for illegal sale of ammunition

The Court of Appeals (CA) has upheld the decision of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to indict four officials of a gun company for unlawful sale of ammunition which authorities said were used in the gruesome Maguindanao massacre in November 2009.

The CA Special 17th Division found no merit in the appeal filed by Arms Corporation of the Philippines (Armscor) officers Victor Karunungan, Eduardo Santos, Lyn Demartin Justo, and Melva Valdez Libao against the DOJ’s May 13, 2011 and October 11, 2013 resolutions that found probable cause to charge them with violating Presidential Decree 1866.

“Far from such knee-jerk reactions, we simply relayed that, as a general rule, if the information is legally efficacious on its face, and there is no showing of manifest error, nor wanton exercise of the faculty conferred upon the public prosecutor, courts should not dismiss it for want of evidence because fact-discovery and evidence presentation may still unfold at the appropriate forum,” the CA said in its ruling on October 27, but was only recently made public.

Case records showed that after a series of raids conducted by the police after the Nov. 23, 2009 massacre that killed 58 people including 32 journalists, some of the firearms used by the perpetrators were excavated by authorities in Maguindanao and were discovered as belonging to the Philippine National Police (PNP).

According to the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, authorities discovered the bullets came from Armscor through the lot numbers assigned to the batches of ammunition.

Police records showed, the PNP’s Firearms and Explosives Division did not issue an ammunitions purchase permit to the police mobile group in Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao for August 21, 2008 and April 10, 2009, making the purchase illegal.

The transactions were paid in cash basis amounting to P20 million and covering the full payment for 1 million rounds of bullets in two batches of five hundred thousand rounds each.

“Hence, despite the apparent illegality of the purchase, petitioners (Armscor officers) caused their approval. Hence, there was no manifest error or arbitrariness on the part of the Assistant State Prosecutor and the DOJ Secretary in their executive determination of probable cause,” the CA said.

Associate Justice Eduardo Peralta Jr. penned the ruling and Associate Justices Priscilla Baltazar-Padilla and Nina Antonio Valenzuela concurred. — Virgil Lopez/VDS, GMA News