The Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office has dismissed the grave threats complaint filed by ACT Teachers party-list Rep. France Castro against former President Rodrigo Duterte for lack of evidence.
“This Office finds the evidence insufficient to indict respondent for grave threats inasmuch as the requisite elements for the crime appear to have been not sufficiently and concretely established contrary to what the complainant wanted to impress upon this Office,” read the resolution dated Jan. 9.
The prosecutor said Castro’s complaint failed to establish that Duterte intended his alleged threats to be taken seriously during his “Gikan Sa Masa, Para Sa Masa” program at SMNI last year.
Castro filed the grave threat complaint after Duterte gave on-air advice to his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, about how she could use intelligence and confidential funds allocated to her office.
“Your first target with your intelligence fund is you, you France.
Tell her, ‘It is you communists who I want to kill,’” Duterte said in the program that was reshared thousands of times on Facebook. It was later deleted from SMNI’s Facebook page.
The prosecutor said Duterte “would have just directly and immediately pronounced the threats” if he wanted to intimidate Castro instead of resorting to “sarcastic” jokes and banter.
“Besides, the Office finds it quite unusual, if not ridiculous for a person to make public pronouncement of death threats…especially so considering that such individual, like [the] respondent, is already in an advanced age and not any more immune from criminal prosecution,” the resolution added.
Duterte skipped the grave threats probe twice.
In his written deposition, Duterte said: “There was never any deliberate intent on my part to single out and threaten complainant Castro.”
Meanwhile, the National Telecommunications Commission said it was carefully studying SMNI’s motions relating to the suspension of its radio and television operations.
On Jan. 11, SMNI filed a Motion for a Bill of Particulars asking the NTC to detail the network’s alleged violations of its franchise provisions.