Dutch police: No bail for Joma

National (as of 9:35 PM)

Dutch police: No bail for Joma

By LOUI GALICIA
ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau

Philippine communist leader Jose Maria Sison will not be freed on bail following his arrest in The Netherlands Tuesday, ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau reported Wednesday.

Wim de Bruin, a spokesman of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, said that walking out on bail is not a possibility under Dutch laws.

“There isn’t a bail procedure. The judge will on Friday decide whether Mr. Sison will stay in custody for another fourteen days or release him. It’s one or the other,” de Bruin told ABS-CBN in a telephone interview.

De Bruin also gave further details about Sison’s arrest.

The founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines was arrested in Utrecht at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday (3:30 p.m. Manila time).

“He was invited by the Dutch police to talk about some of the cases and then he was arrested,” de Bruin said.

Luis Jalandoni, chairman of the National Democratic Front, told ABS-CBN morning program "Umagang Kay Ganda" that Sison was tricked into thinking that he was being called to report to the police station about other developments in his case.

De Bruin did not deny Jalandoni’s allegations.

“For sure it was a strategy because the police didn’t want to raid his house and arrest him there. They thought it would be more careful to invite him to the police station and arrest him there,” de Bruin said.

De Bruin said the police thought the arrest profile would be lower if Sison is invited to the station.

Sison was brought to the Scheveningen prison in The Hague.

He will be detained there until Friday prior to an initial appearance before a Dutch court.

De Bruin said he could not give a specific time for Friday’s court proceedings.

He said the judge has his own schedule for that.

De Bruin said that the Dutch police went to Manila during the investigation and interviewed several witnesses, details of which he declined to give.

He also said that it is hard to reveal the incriminating evidences leading to Sison’s arrest at present.

“The investigation started a year ago, in 2006 and in that period, about a year…more than a year, the Dutch national police gathered enough evidence to arrest Mr. Sison but the investigation is still ongoing and will take some more months and more witnesses will be interviewed by the police and also by the courts," he said.

"So overall the evidence will be presented when the court will try the case and that will take several months,” de Bruin added.

De Bruin also said that though the crimes were committed in 2003, it was only last year when the Dutch police received information about the possible involvement of Sison in the murders of Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara.

De Bruin also dismissed a statement by Kintanar’s widow claiming that she filed a case against Sison.

“No, none was [filed] in The Netherlands. The Dutch police [were] in the Philippines to talk to witnesses but I can’t specify [the] witness contacted and who was not,” de Bruin said.

A Newsbreak online report (www.newsbreak.ph) said Joy, Kintanar's widow, admitted that she filed a case against Sison. "Yes, I filed a case [against Sison]," Kintanar said in a text message to Newsbreak.

“If there is enough information for serious suspicion, an investigation can start. You don’t need a person to file a complaint. But it started not with a statement of one of the relatives. It started from another information,” de Bruin said.

De Bruin declined to say at this time if the incriminating information which led Dutch police to begin the investigation came from the Philippines.

He also declined to give details regarding possible telephone intercepts or wiretaps to Sison’s house as part of the investigation.

“Too early to make information about the investigation public. They will be made public later on,” de Bruin said.

Sison is detained inside a complex of cell barracks forming a penitentiary in the seaside suburb of The Hague.

The prison was once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch resistance fighters. The complex also houses the United Nation’s International Criminal Tribunal's detention center for accused criminals being prosecuted for war crimes from the former Yugoslavia.

Sison has been living in self-exile in The Netherlands since the late 1980s.

SOURCE: http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/


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