This case has been cited 1 times or more.
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2003-11-11 |
PER CURIAM |
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| Jocelyn's testimony identifying the appellants as two of her kidnappers cannot be discredited on the bare claim that the PAOCTF agents failed to conduct search and arrest operations in Barangay Macatal, Aurora, Isabela, where the appellants' mother Leticia Pua resided and where their farm was located. Although Jocelyn and the appellants were schoolmates, there is no evidence on record that she knew the appellants' home addresses. Hence, she could not have revealed such information to Col. Aquino after the kidnappers released her on November 29, 1998. Moreover, on November 30, 1999, or barely a day after Jocelyn's release, the PAOCTF agents learned from the Monarch Rent-A-Car personnel that the appellants and accused Nelson Laddit Pua were residing at the addresses indicated in the rental agreements. [74] The agents forthwith conducted search and arrest operations in the places enumerated therein, but the appellants were nowhere to be found. At that point in time, the PAOCTF agents were unaware that the appellants' mother resided in Aurora, Isabela. When the agents later learned of this, they secured copies of warrants of arrest of "Nelson Pua" and appellant Benley from the MTC of Cauayan in Criminal Cases Nos. 96-123 and 96-163 and 98-243 to 98-245. Moreover, the PAOCTF agents did not know that there were two persons going by the name "Nelson Pua" who were involved in the kidnapping, namely, accused Nelson Laddit Pua and his cousin, the appellant Nelson Ancheta Pua. The agents were not even aware that the Nelson Pua who was charged in Criminal Cases Nos. 98-243 to 98-245 before the MTC of Cauayan, lsabela was the accused Nelson Laddit Pua and not the appellant Nelson Ancheta Pua. The Court, thus, agrees with the following ruminations of the trial court:The defense claim then that since Joy knows them, she should have had them arrested earlier than January 1999 lacks much substance. Indeed, the PAOCTF, as asserted by both accused, raided the house of Nelson Pua y Laddit and that of his father sometime in December 15, 1998 and it appears that PAOCTF intelligence-gathering was, at that time not fool-proof because the one they thought was Nelson Pua, one of the accused in this case, was not really the Nelson charged here, but another Nelson Pua, a namesake and cousin of the accused, who, unlike the herein Nelson Pua, is residing not in Isabela province but in Guadalajara, Guadalupe, Cebu City. As far as this Court has observed it, not a few Chinese or Filipinos of Chinese descent here are quite good in this kind of trickery and/or gobbledygook.[75] | |||||