 A Muslim group said yesterday it had two witnesses who would swear that police planted the explosives and guns to be supposedly used in an alleged Islamic terror plot to bomb the Black Nazarene procession. Yusoph Ledesma, head of the Balik Islam Unity Congress, said the pair were preparing affidavits stating that police had found no evidence against the supposed plotters when they raided the Islamic Information Center in Manila last Friday.| "Nope. T'warn't us! Ask anybody." |
Quoting the witnesses, Ledesma said that on breaking into the center, the raiders immediately handcuffed 17 persons and pushed them to the floor. Police later brought in black helicopters and airdropped "big black bags" from which they took out guns and explosives, Ledesma claimed. "Then they called in the media to announce that they got the terrorists with evidence to show," Ledesma told reporters during his group's protest rally in front of Camp Crame, the PNP's general headquarters in Quezon City. The other witness was also at the center and saw the same thing, according to Ledesma.| Just before his lips fell off. |
Senior Superintendent Rodolfo Mendoza curtly dismissed Ledesma's claim. "The evidence was not planted," the officer in charge of the Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group told the Inquirer in a text message. Mendoza, in a press statement later, defended the raid, saying it was triggered by "verified information gathered by the CIDG that the Islamic Information Center was being used as a front by radical Islam groups and individuals. In a statement issued in Marawi, the relatives of the Maranao Muslims who were arrested said the "finest thing the media could do is to verify or countercheck reports that tend to suggest that Islam or the Muslims themselves are anti-Christ, because this could fan animosity and it is not good for the communities and people who have spent the best of their times (doing) legitimate businesses." | "And you certainly don't want to fan our animosity, not if you know what's good for you..." |
"How could anyone of them think of mass killing and on a big Christian fete when they know how Muslims revere Christ, whose miraculous birth is narrated in a whole chapter of the Koran?" said (detainee Afgani) Alonto's brother, Dr. Ahmad Domocao E. Alonto. |