The Taguig City Regional Trial Court Branch 266 acquitted two National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace consultants and three others of charges of kidnapping with murder and frustrated murder.
The Court ordered the release of consultants Renante Gamara and Tirso Alcantara, as well as peasant organizer Dionisio Almonte, and construction workers Diony Borre and Raul Razo.
Gamara, Borre and Razo were released from Metro Manila District Jail Annex 4 last night, August 14, 2025, in Taguig City while Almonte remains detained at the New Bilibid Prisons, rights group Karapatan reported.
Tried in absentia, Alcantara’s whereabouts is unknown. He remains in hiding after the Rodrigo Duterte government cancelled formal peace negotiations in 2017.
The five were implicated along with 32 other respondents in a case involving the kidnapping killing of a soldier and the frustrated killing of a “rebel returnee” in Mauban, Quezon in May 2007.
Karapatan said the basis for including their names in the warrant of arrest were “spurious. ”
Gamara, who was arrested in March 2012 on the basis of the warrant issued as far back as May 2011, had his name included only 11 days before his arrest.
The military claimed that he was the “Ka Mike” being referred to in the warrant, Karapatan revealed.
But according to Gamara, he had never set foot in Mauban and was in Manila campaigning for Bayan Muna when the reported incident occurred.
He was granted bail in 2016 to participate as a consultant in the formal peacetalks between the NDFP and Philippine government.
He was rearrested in March 2019 when fabricated evidence of firearms and explosives were planted in the place where he was staying, Karapatan said.
Civilian Borre was included in the charges for being the son-in-law of the late Gregorio “Ka Roger” Rosal, former spokesperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Like Gamara, he asserted that he had never been to Mauban, Quezon.
Almonte was helping out in a bakery while Razo was at a construction site at the time of the incident, respectively.
“Public prosecutors have this insidious practice of amending arrest orders by adding the names of targeted personalities, claiming without basis that the aliases on the warrant belong to them. The trumped up charges were also based on the perjured testimonies of a so-called rebel surrenderee named Erwin Rosales, whose claims were considered hearsay by the court, and the failed attempt of the prosecutors to establish their participation in the alleged crime,“ decried Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay.
“We are glad that the court saw through the lies and inconsistencies in the testimonies of the prosecution witnesses,” Palabay added, “and we hail the efforts of the defense lawyers in ferreting out the truth and securing the liberty of those who had been wrongfully accused and unjustly detained for so long.” # (Raymund B. Villanueva)
