Lucena mediaman files raps vs water district head

LUCENA City—A mediaman here has filed an oral defamation case against the head of Quezon Metropolitan Water District (QMWD) here after receiving death threats through text messages he believed the official was responsible for.

Ronaldo Agbaya, 41, reporter of Eyewatch News weekly and dwKI-FM, filed his complaint against QMWD general manager Enrico Pasumbal at the City Prosecutor’s Office on Friday.

While he stressed that he was not accusing Pasumbal of directly sending the messages, he noted that it came after the official was widely criticized by different media groups for allegedly harassing him.

Agbaya said he decided to file the case because he was afraid for his life and his family after he received the text messages last week.

“I’m just taking extra precautionary measures,” he explained.

The threatening messages came after he was allegedly verbally abused by Pasumbal over his coverage of a traffic incident involving a QMWD vehicle, noted Agbaya.

Some of the text messages read: “Kpag d u tumigil e may pupuntahan k” (If you don’t stop you will end up somewhere) and “Kaibigan, manahimik ka na at la ka alalahanin sa grupo” (Friend, shut up and you will have nothing to worry about).

“There are other text messages sent from different numbers. When I called the numbers, they were not available,” Agbaya said on Sunday.  Agbaya said he reported the text messages to the police.

Lawyer Vicente Joyas, QMWD board secretary and spokesman, laughed off the text messages purportedly received by Agbaya. “Anyone can just send text threats to anybody. Even Mr. Pasumbal also received death threats after the incident but he just ignored it,” Joyas said over the phone.

He declined to comment on the filing of the case because they have yet to receive a copy of the complaint.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP)-Quezon Chapter condemned the harassment.

Jason Vallecer, NUJP-Quezon chairman, said that what was happening to Agbaya was “an obvious threat to media freedom.”

“Receiving death threat is not a joke to us. We’re taking it very seriously,” he said.