Former party-list lawmaker and alleged communist leader Saturnino Ocampo has asked the Tagum City Provincial Prosecutor in Davao del Norte to dismiss the criminal charges filed against him, lamenting the complaint was part of a political persecution.
In a 15-page counter-affidavit, Ocampo said the complaint for violation of Rep Act No. 10364, or the Expanded Trafficking in Persons Act of 2012, in relation to Rep. Act No. 7610 or Anti Child Abuse Law and kidnapping and failure to return a minor, was one of the many trumped-up charges filed against him since 1989.
Ocampo stressed that only one of the eight cases filed against him had prospered while he had been acquitted in the other cases.
“I am thus a veteran target of false and outrightly perjured witness testimonies as to easily detect the same in this instant complaint,” he said.
“I did not commit any crime. Hence, I humbly pray that the instant complaint be immediately dismissed for lack of probable cause and for being a clear case of political persecution,” Ocampo added.
The case arose rom the complaint filed by the Talaingod Municipal Police Station in connection with the incident last November involving minors transported from a lumad school.
In his affidavit, Ocampo denied having been actually at the school where the incident took place claiming he was left in a van which was not allowed to proceed to the school at a military checkpoint in Sitio Igang on the way to the school.
The former lawmaker argued that he was implicated in the complaint being an invited member of a National Solidarity Mission, organized by the Save our Schools Network, to provide humanitarian assistance to the lumad students and teachers of the Salugpungan Ta Tanu Ingkanogon Community learning Center, Inc., whose schools in Talaingod were being forcibly closed down by the military and its paramilitary group.
Ocampo noted that by the time he arrived in Davao City and joined the NSM delegates on Nov. 28, 2018, the Salugpungan school in Sitio Nasilaban of Barangay Palma Gil had already been shut down for two weeks.
While the other Salugpungan school in Sitio Dulyan had been targeted for closure with the teachers and students holding out, and that a food blockade had been imposed to force them to leave.