It’s a hoax, police say of rape-kidnap

7-21-2009 Trinadad:

Camp Dangwa, La Trinidad, Benguet – It’s a hoax.

This in gist is what police authorities here summed up the earlier reported abduction and rape of a 13-year-old high school student from Baguio City who is reportedly a daughter of an anti-narcotics agent.

Chief Supt. Orlando Pestano, Cordillera police regional director, said that based on the police investigation, the reported incident never happened within his area of jurisdiction.

Pestano also refused to confirm whether the teenager is the daughter of an anti-drug agent, a law enforcer or an ordinary individual who was simply a victim of the usual gang gatherings in Baguio City.

Police investigation disclosed that at about 3:30 p.m. of July 18, the 13-year-old girl student was fetched by her male friends, who were 13 to 15 years old, and had a drinking spree in the house of one of her friends until she was drunk. Police said the teenager refused to go home drunk because she was afraid to be scolded but her friends accompanied her home and disembarked at the gate near her residence.

At about 8 p.m., the girl’s mother requested the assistance of a police officer at the Baguio City Police Office to go to the Baguio General Hospital for medical examination of the girl.

The mother however, requested the police to keep the incident away from public and the press.

Medical and physical examinations were conducted on the girl and when her father arrived, she and her parents all left the hospital at 2:20 a.m. the following day.

Medico legal findings by her attending physician showed she may not have been raped as her private part was “negative for sperm identification” but noted “presence of plenty of gram-positive short rods and pus cells.”

Pestano said that the findings of the attending physician will avert any wrong speculations on the incident.

To ensure the accuracy of the information being released to the public, the police official ordered the conduct of an investigation on how the false information was leaked to the media so that the same will not be repeated in the future to prevent the humiliation of the involved parties.

He ordered police units in the region to intensify their anti-drug operations in order to arrest notorious drug personalities and reduce the volume of drugs being circulated in the Cordillera to spare the youth from the serious negative effects of unabated drug use.

He said the report on the alleged abduction and alleged rape of the daughter of an anti-drug agent is considered to be a setback on the part of law enforcers if it were true “but the actual investigation showed otherwise.”

He deplored that due to the incident, there is a need for the people to be clarified about the issue “since it even reached the attention of President Arroyo who was so mad about what happened.” ..Source.. by DEXTER A. SEE