A Filipina whose accusations of rape led to the conviction of a US Marine has altered her testimony and emigrated to the US, saying she was no longer certain that a crime took place, a lawyer said yesterday.
The case hurt US-Philippine military relations amid calls for the scrapping of a pact allowing US troops to train Filipino soldiers, and has become a rallying point for anti-US protests.
DOUBTS
Three years after Lance Corporal Daniel Smith was convicted of rape and sentenced to 40 years in jail, his accuser submitted a five-page affidavit to an appeals court on Tuesday saying she now doubts her own version of events.
“My conscience continues to bother me realizing that I may have in fact been so friendly and intimate with Daniel Smith ... that he was led to believe that I was amenable to having sex or that we simply just got carried away,” the woman said in the statement.
She said the two were drinking, kissing and dancing at a bar at the former US Naval base at Subic Bay before moving to a van, where she originally told the court she was raped when she passed out. Smith had insisted the sex was consensual.
The turnabout has shocked her supporters, including lawyer Evalyn Ursua, who said her client terminated her services this week then moved to the US to start a new life and was no longer willing to talk.
Philippine Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said the woman could be charged with perjury and her affidavit may not be admitted as new evidence because it should have been introduced during the 2006 trial.
“I am not happy with her because her accusations divided the nation, then she turns her back on everything,” he said, adding the case had affected the country’s foreign policy.
APPEAL
The US embassy in Manila is consulting with US government legal experts in Washington on the case, embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Thompson said, without elaborating. She refused to comment on reports that the woman had gone to the US.
Smith, 23, from St. Louis, Missouri, has been detained at the US embassy while his case is on appeal. Last month, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled he should be serving his sentence in a Philippine jail but left it to the government to negotiate his transfer with Washington. Smith is appealing his conviction.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS