Ampatuan kin seeks hospital stay

57 LOST DREAMS ON GROUND ZERO Families of slain journalists offer flowers at the site where 57 people, 32 of them media workers, were mercilessly mowed down by members of a powerful Muslim clan on Nov. 23, 2009, in the town of Ampatuan, Maguindanao province. JEOFFREY MAITEM / INQUIRER MINDANAO

An Ampatuan grandson is seeking hospital confinement anew as he is still suffering from “medical maladies.”

Anwar Ampatuan Jr., grandson of clan patriarch and coaccused Andal Ampatuan Sr., appealed to the Quezon City court trying their multiple murder case to order his transfer to a government hospital due to his “life-threatening injuries.”

But he clarified that he was not seeking hospital arrest for the length of the trial but only until his wounds healed.

In a four-page urgent motion for hospital confinement, Ampatuan said the Quezon City Jail Annex infirmary in Taguig City was inadequate to meet his medical needs.

Ampatuan’s lawyer Emmanuel Brotarlo filed the pleading on Thursday in QC Regional Trial Court Branch 221 of Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes.

Ampatuan, one of 196 people charged in the Nov. 23, 2009, Maguindanao massacre which left 57 people dead, was transferred to a jail cell from the Philippine General Hospital on April 23. He was confined at the hospital after his arrest following a bomb explosion on a boat he was on on March 25.

According to Ampatuan, he was suffering from “medical maladies” such as a “gaping wound in his back, vision and hearing problems, pain and numbness in his stomach down to his extremities resulting in continued paralysis.” Julie M. Aurelio