LEGAL POINT OF VIEW
By Atty. Ephraim Cortez
Ludicrous! This is how I describe the newest terrorist financing case filed against the 11 activists from Cagayan Valley.
Using the perjured statements of military assets, the government alleged that the Cagayan Valley activists supplied rice to NPA rebels by burying the rice in the hinterlands of Cagayan. The military assets allegedly provided the information to locate the place where the rice were buried. These were excavated, and the rotten rice is being used as a basis to file the case for terrorist financing.
The fabricated charges are based on the same badly written and discredited script that the government concocted and has been using to file trumped-up charges for terrorist financing.
They used the same script to charge an activist from Southern Tagalog, claiming that she gave adobo and cooked rice to NPA rebels. The DOJ National Prosecution Service found probable cause and indicted her for terrorist financing. A court in Batangas dismissed the case for lack of probable cause.
This case is more ludicrous than the adobo and rice case. The rice was never delivered to its supposed recipient. It remained buried from 2019 until it was excavated in 2026. By then, the rice was no longer edible.
The government’s scriptwriters are “writing for fools”, and the charges are obviously shallow, and no right-minded individual would believe them, except, maybe, the prosecutors of the National Prosecution Service.
We hope that the investigating prosecutor assigned to this case will be critical enough to see through the shallowness of the charges and dismiss the case.
