Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV said on Saturday that suspicious-looking men have been casing his house as he continued to hole up at the Senate to avoid arrest after President Rodrigo Duterte revoked his amnesty for two failed mutinies.
Trillanes said his camp listed the license plate numbers of vehicles seen around his house, but these turned out to be unregistered, leading him to conclude that these were from the government’s intelligence units.
“We are making the necessary security arrangements,” Trillanes, one of the President’s most vocal critics, said over radio station dwIZ.
Used to harassment
In the radio interview, the former mutineer and ex-Navy lieutenant said this was not the first time his family was thrust into this kind of situation.
So even if he doesn’t want his family to go through this, they were prepared “psychologically and emotionally,” he said.
He also slammed what he said were attempts to draw him out of the Senate through pronouncements from Mr. Duterte and other officials that he would not be arrested without a warrant from the court.
Road arrest
Aside from members of the military informing him that he would still be seized if he went out, it was also shown that the statements were a bluff by the incident on Thursday when his vehicle was followed when it went out of the Senate compound.
This took place after he said earlier the same day that he would leave the Senate after the Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to get an arrest warrant for him from the Makati regional trial court.
He said he surmised that he would have been intercepted and arrested on the road had he gone out and this would render moot his court case contesting the President’s move to revoke his amnesty.