By JOSEPH G. LARIOSA

(© 2011 Journal Group Link International)

C HICAGO (jGLi) – A “trimmer” Michael Ray Aquino departed from Los Angeles, California at about 10:30 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) Friday (June 24) on board Philippine Airlines PR Flight 103, according to Vice Consul John Reyes of the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles.

In a phone interview, Mr. Reyes told this reporter Mr. Aquino was turned over by U.S. Marshals to two National Bureau of Investigation agents shortly before the flight that will arrive at the Ninoy Aquino International airport at 6:05 a.m. on Sunday, June 26.

He said Mr. Aquino was issued a one-page travel document that serves as his passport. It has his name and his picture in it.

Mr. Aquino was wearing “casual” clothes but Mr. Reyes could not confirm if Aquino has a bullet-proof vest “kasi hindi na kami makapasok sa eroplano (because we were no longer allowed in the plane).”

During the extradition of Aquino’s co-accused, Cezar O. Mancao, in 2009, Mr. Mancao requested for a bullet-proof vest for fear of his safety when he arrived in Manila.

Vice Consul Reyes was there to make sure that Aquino’s rights as a Filipino citizen were safeguarded.

He said he had a talk with Mr. Aquino inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles for about an hour and had attended to Aquino’s needs. Reyes said he is not free to divulge information they discussed to the media.

Mr. Reyes said when he compared pictures of Aquino when he first arrived in the United States to the pictures that they took for his travel document, “Mr. Aquino is much trimmer because he worked out in a gym.”

INCOMMUNICADO

N obody was allowed to talk to Aquino from the time he arrived from his New Jersey prisons last Wednesday (June 22) until he left. When Mr. Aquino was being transported he was on board “a dark-colored tinted van.”

GMANews earlier reported that on June 24, 2001, then Police Colonel Aquino flew to Hong Kong on his way to the United States to evade the charges leveled against him as one of the main suspects in the double murder of Filipino publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito.

Messrs. Dacer and Corbito were abducted and strangled and incinerated on Nov. 24, 2000, exactly seven months to the day of Aquino’s flight to Hong Kong.

Mr. Aquino’s departure draws to a close Aquino’s more than five years of stay in U.S. prisons since he was arrested on Sept. 10, 2005, at his residence at Queens, New York, for conspiring with a former FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Filipino-American intelligence analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, of passing classified information to current and former officials the Philippines.

Aquino won an appeal to a reduction of his spying sentence from 36 to 46 months in February 2009. But before he could be released after serving 41 months to time served, the Philippine government sought his extradition for allegedly playing a part in the conspiracy of abducting, carnapping and strangling Dacer and Corbito.

Meanwhile, Aragoncillo, who did not appeal, is still serving prison time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto in southwest Pennsylvania. He is due for release on May 28, 2014.

When Aquino returns to the Philippines, he will likely be kept in Manila City Jail, which is under the Regional Trial Court, which will try him in the murders of Dacer and Corbito.

CHANGE OF HEART

It is possible the recent discharge of Mr. Aquino’s former superior then General-turned-Senator Panfilo “Ping” M. Lacson from criminal information by the Philippine Court of Appeals that was affirmed by the Philippine Supreme Court might have influenced Mr. Aquino to have a change of heart in waiving his right to appeal his habeas corpus before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Philippine Court of Appeals cited Aquino’s co-accused Cezar O. Mancao’s alleged inconsistencies in statements he gave to television interviews and his sworn statements in finding “null and void” information against Lacson and quashing Lacson’s warrant of arrest.

Mr. Aquino even used the decision by the Philippine Court of Appeals in the Lacson case as part of his supporting documents submitted to the Third Circuit but the certified documents mailed to the court must have come too late as the same U.S. court denied Mr. Aquino’s last-minute appeal.

When the Philippine Department of Justice opens a re-investigation of the double murder, it will start from scratch and would likely not be solely dependent on Mancao’s statements but on other testimonies from other witnesses and other accused.

There are nearly two dozens mostly police officers, who carried out the sensational double murder, that extend to the chain of command, including Lacson and former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada. Both Messrs. Lacson and Estrada had denied any part of the murders that carry a penalty of maximum life in prison. # # #

Editor’s Note: To contact the author, please e-mail him at: (lariosa_jos@sbcglobal.net)