Police officer slaps Lozada wife with perjury charges

Violeta Cruz-Lozada, the wife of whistleblower Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr, was slapped with perjury charges before the Manila Prosecutor's Office by a police officer who was linked to Rodolfo's alleged abduction. In his five-page criminal complaint filed on Monday, Sr. Supt. Paul Mascariñas, deputy director of the Police Security and Protection Office of the Philippine National Police, refuted the claims of Mrs Lozada that her husband's "liberty was restrained" when unidentified men allegedly snatched Rodolfo out of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport minutes after he arrived from Hong Kong on February 5. In her habeas corpus petition at the Supreme Court, Mrs Lozada said she believed that her husband was detained against his will and without any legal basis by the respondents or by other people who had control and supervision over Rodolfo. Mascariñas claimed that Mrs Lozada insinuated that she did not know the whereabouts of her husband until the time she filed the case at 1:11 p.m. of February 6. But the police officer said Lozada’s wife was lying because she had already been reunited with her husband since the evening of February 5. Lawyer Virgilio Pablico, chief of the legal division of the PNP-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, sent a two-page letter to Manila City Prosecutor Joseph Lopez to support Mascarinas’s complaint. In the letter, Pablico said Rodolfo admitted during the Feb. 8 Senate hearing on the National Broadband Network controversy that he was taken to the De La Salle Greenhills campus in Mandaluyong City on February 5, where he was reunited with his family. "It is more than crystal clear that Mr. Lozada was in La Salle Greenhills from the evening of Feb. 5 until late morning of Feb. 6 and his wife is cognizant of this fact. None, of the foregoing facts appear in the petition. They have been willfully and deliberately concealed by Mrs. Lozada, despite the fact that they were clearly material and relevant to the issue of habeas corpus," Pablico added. - GMANews.TV