Philippine authorities have foiled a fresh plot to oust President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, arresting an opposition lawyer, three retired colonels and a former police officer, the national police chief said yesterday.
Avelino Razon said the group was also trying to extort up to US$10 million from a Japanese trader to raise funds to launch destabilization activities to topple Arroyo.
“We have enough basis to charge them for a plot to commit coup d’etat,” Razon told reporters, adding that the police had expanded an inquiry to determine the extent of the new plot and “find out who else might be involved.”
Officers were piecing together details of the fresh plot after stumbling across it in the course of an extortion inquiry, he said.
FIVE CHARGED
All five were preliminarily charged with planning to commit a coup d’etat, Senior State Prosecutor Emmanuel Velasco said, adding that he had 60 days to decide if there was enough basis to forward the charges to a local court where the men would then be formally charged.
“The lawyer and three former soldiers are also facing charges of obstruction of justice and harbouring a fugitive,” Velasco said.
He said the ex-police officer, who has an arrest warrant, was also accused of using an illegal alias.
Another retired colonel was also charged, but remains at large, he added.
The lawyer, aligned with the opposition, was having lunch with the retired colonels and a former police officer when police rounded them up at a restaurant in Manila on Wednesday.
“It was an entrapment operation after the group had asked a Japanese businessman to provide them with funds to stage fresh attempts to oust the president,” Razon said, adding that the initial complaint came from another lawyer.
The lawyer was one of the defense lawyers of a marine colonel facing mutiny charges for his role in an alleged coup plot against Arroyo in February 2006.
He denied the charges, saying the witness against them was “a pathological liar.”
“These are baseless charges, these will not stand in court,” he said.
All three former soldiers have been linked to several past coup attempts since 1989 while the former police officer has an arrest warrant for the murder of an army captain in 2001.
ZAMBOANGA BLAST
Three people were killed and 12 wounded yesterday when communist insurgents threw a grenade into a bakery in the southern Philippines, the military said.
The incident happened just before dawn in Nabunturan town on restive Mindanao island, local army official Lieutenant Richard Villaflor said
The bakery was targeted after its owners refused to pay demands from the New People’s Army for extortion money, known here as “revolutionary taxes,” the official said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS