PARTY-LIST Representative France L. Castro asked the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday to review her criminal complaint against former president Rodrigo R. Duterte for stating in a television interview last year his alleged threat to kill her.
Last week, the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the congresswoman’s grave threat compliant for lack of evidence.
In a 37-page petition for review she filed before the DoJ, Ms. Castro said Quezon City prosecutors “seriously erred in dismissing and trivializing” Mr. Duterte’s remarks against her “as merely sarcastic advice or suggestion or opinion” without citing any factual or legal basis in support thereof.
“A careful examination of said subject utterances reveals that Respondent-Appellee Duterte had not intended to mean the opposite of what he wanted to say,” according to a copy of the petition.
In the SMNI interview being cited, Mr. Duterte said he had told his daughter, Vice President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio, to say that she would use her proposed intelligence funds to kill Maoists in Congress including Ms. Castro.
The interview was aired after the congresswoman had criticized the proposed P650-million confidential and intelligence funds for the offices of Ms. Duterte, which Congress later stripped.
“The sensitive subject of confidential funds amounting to hundreds of millions of pesos to fund the killing of a public official whom the Respondent-Appellee wanted to be killed first is not, by any stretch of the imagination,” Ms. Castro’s petition read. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
