Ramgen murder suspect claims Janelle, lawyers lying

One of the suspects in last year’s killing of actor Ramgen Bautista has accused the victim’s girlfriend, Janelle Manahan, and her lawyers of making up the charges against him.

And to back up his accusation, Takahiro “Hiro” Furuyama on Thursday filed perjury charges at the Parañaque City Prosecutor’s Office against Manahan and the lawyers representing her—Argee Guevarra, Resty Mendoza and Renecio Espiritu.

In particular, he claimed that Guevarra, Mendoza and Espiritu had lied under oath because they coaxed their client to implicate him in Bautista’s death.

Furuyama is married to Gail, Bautista’s younger sister who, like her husband, has been accused of plotting the actor’s murder, along with her two other siblings, Ramon Joseph or RJ and Ma. Ramona.

“They involved Hiro here because Janelle [saw him looking guilty at the hospital where she and Bautista were taken]. That was fed [to her] by her lawyers,” Gerardo Alberto, Furuyama’s counsel, said.

He added that Manahan’s fourth supplemental affidavit which was filed on Dec. 14—where she linked the couple to her boyfriend’s killing—was based only on hearsay.

“If you look at the affidavit, Janelle did not really have a statement there implicating the two of them. What was in there were phrases such as ‘according to my lawyer,’ and ‘as told to me by my lawyer’ which means her counsels had induced her to say these,” Alberto said.

He also noted that the Parañaque police did not mention the Furuyamas in their investigation and neither were they among the people whom the prosecutors who conducted the preliminary investigation had ordered charged.

Sought for comment, Guevarra denied Furuyama’s claims.

“Good luck to them. I think the countercharge is defective in its face. If they say we manufactured the statements, did we also manufacture Ramona Bautista’s flight [to Turkey] and her inclusion in the Interpol’s red notice list?” he said.

The other day, Guevarra told reporters that the Interpol had placed Ramona in its red notice list, thus paving the way for her arrest and deportation by any of the 190 member-nations.

Genelyn Magsaysay, the mother of Ramgen and suspects Gail, Ramona and Ramon Joseph, said that her lawyer had asked Interpol to place Ramona on its blue notice list.

Authorities can only request additional information about a person in the blue notice list.

Meanwhile, the pre-trial conference scheduled Thursday for the murder and frustrated murder charges (in connection with the attack on Manahan) filed against Ramona, RJ, Michael Nartea, Roy Francis Tolisora, Glaiza Visda, Ryan Pastera and Jan Norwin dela Cruz was cut short after their lawyers said that they had many pieces of documentary evidence that had yet to be marked.