FILE – Bohol Provincial Board Member Niño Rey Boniel is escorted back to his detention cell in Cebu City hours before he is transferred to a jail facility in Bohol nearer his hometown in Bien Unido. FILE PHOTO / JUNJIE MENDOZA / CEBU DAILY NEWS
CEBU CITY – The Lapu-Lapu City Prosecutor’s Office found probable cause to elevate the parricide case against Bohol Provincial Board Member Niño Rey Boniel for killing his wife, Mayor Gisela Boniel of Bien Unido town, Bohol.
Niño was formally charged with parricide at the Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 54 in Lapu-Lapu City on Friday morning.
Instead of parricide as originally filed by the police, the prosecutor’s office filed murder case against Niño’s two alleged cohorts –Wilfredo Hoylar and Restituto Magoncia.
Niño’s cousin Reolito Boniel and driver Randel Lupas were earlier indicted for murder after they decided to forego the conduct of a preliminary investigation and confessed their participation in the crime.
Reolito and Lupas were being endorsed as state witnesses by the police.
In their resolution dated June 28, the panel of prosecutors did not give weight to the claim of the board member that his wife was still alive but was in hiding to escape “millions (of pesos worth) of debts.”
The panel, instead, ruled to let the court conduct a full-blown trial to thresh out the issues.
The panel members were Assistant Prosecutors Jude Henritz Ycong, Shielamar Abadia, and Francis Ian Birondo.
The findings of the three-man panel of prosecutors were approved by Lapu-Lapu City Prosecutor Ruzo Zaragoza.
The charges against the accused were raffled off to Judge Victor Teves of the RTC Branch 54 of Lapu-Lapu City.
However, the cases will eventually be sent to the Cebu City RTC in compliance with an earlier directive of the Supreme Court. In 2015, Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez issued a memorandum circular mandating 12 judges in Cebu City to handle newly filed cases in the courts of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu.
The setup was meant to speed up the work and to help the “overburdened” RTCs in Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu City.
Aside from the parricide case, Niño was also charged with kidnapping and serious illegal detention at the RTC in Talibon for allegedly detaining Gisela’s best friend Angela Leyson, who along with her 17-year-old son to prevent them from reporting to authorities after he allegedly took Gisela and later killed her.