The daughters of the late publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer have filed a case in a US court against former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada, fugitive Sen. Panfilo Lacson and five others over the killing of their father and his driver in November 2000, GMANews.TV said Saturday. The Dacer daughters are trying to seek justice for the murder of their father “as justice ... remains elusive in the Philippine court system,” the television network news online said. Lacson and the five other accused have a pending case in Philippine courts in connection with the twin killings, but it is the first time that Estrada was officially linked to the case. Dacer was abducted on Nov. 24, 2000 and later killed, along with his driver Emmanuel Corbito, when Estrada was president and Lacson was his police chief. Their decomposed bodies were found in a Cavite town a few weeks after the double murder. Some sketchy reports said Dacer and his driver were on their way to meet former president Fidel Ramos with documents that could implicate Estrada to corruption in government. Dacer was a popular publicist whose clients were mainly top figures in Philippine politics like Estrada and Ramos. The reason for the twin killings has remained unclear but at that time Estrada was mired in a corruption scandal. Estrada later stepped down from office as hundreds of thousands of people staged street protests when his allies in Congress tried to block the presentation of evidence linking him to graft. Estrada was later sentenced by a graft court to life imprisonment but then president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, his successor, pardoned him by presidential fiat. The Dacers are seeking a $20 million compensatory damage and $100 million punitive damages in the case filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and Torture Victim Protection Act, both American statutes, in filing the damage suit. GMANews.TV said their lawyer Demetrio Custodio said in a phone interview that the statutes allow US courts to hear cases of human rights abuses brought by foreign citizens against officials of a foreign government for crimes committed anywhere in the world. The report said the Dacers have the right to file the case because they are already US residents. The petitioners were Carina Dacer, Sabrina Dacer-Reyes, Amparo Dacer-Henso and Emily Dacer-Hungerford. Aside from Estrada and Lacson, who were named principal suspects in the case, the Dacers also named five others as respondents in the case: Dante Tan, former president and chief executive officer of the stock firm BW; Reynaldo Tenorio, former head of the Philippine Games and Amusement Corp. (Pagcor); former police Senior Supt. Michael Ray Aquino; former police Supt. Glenn Dumlao, and former police Chief Inspector Vicente Arnado. Lacson, a critic of Arroyo, fled the country in January this year after he was implicated by Dumlao in the case and accused Arroyo of pursuing the case as an act of political vendetta. Dumlao was extradited to the Philippines in July 2009, more than six years after he fled to the United States in May 2003. Lacson was the head of the Philippine National Police and the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, the unit implicated in the twin murders. Tan was implicated in the BW stock manipulation scandal. He also fled to the US after he was implicated in Manila case. Tenorio is reported to be in the US while Aquino has been detained in the US, serving his sentence for espionage. The Dacers said Arnado has been living in the US since 2002. GMANews.TV said the Dacers alleged in their complaint that the accused “subjected their father to ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, torture and extra-judicial killing'.” “The said cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, torture and extra-judicial killing of plaintiffs' father were carried out by defendants under actual or apparent authority, or color of law, of the Philippines under the administration of then-president Estrada,” GMANews.TV quoted part of the complaint as saying. It added that the accused “exceeded the authority vested in them as government officials under customary international law of human rights and the law of nations.” The Dacers are seeking a jury trial for the case, GMANews.TV said. The television network online said it contacted Margaux Salcedo, Estrada's spokesperson, in a text message but he refused to comment “as we have not received any official information”
