Lacson: I'll come out if justice is served or after I am dead

(Updated 3:58 p.m.) "I will only come out when justice is rightly served or when I’m already dead." Fugitive Sen. Panfilo Lacson issued this statement on Thursday as he maintained his innocence in the Dacer-Corbito killings in 2000. In a statement distributed to the media by the senator's office, Lacson also reiterated his request to Justice Secretary Leila de Lima to order a reinvestigation of the case. But De Lima, in a statement released Thursday afternoon, maintained that Lacson should first surrender in order for him to obtain the justice he is seeking from the government. Lacson left the country early this year before a Manila court could issue a warrant for his arrest. He questioned if it was right for him to be in jail for a crime he did not commit. "I will only come out when justice is rightly served, or when I’m already dead. It may not be the best way to spend geezerhood, but unless you get me ahead of my time, I prefer to suffer in pain but with dignity, sitting alone with my conscience for the rest of my life, rather than do time in jail for a crime I did not commit," Lacson said. He also said several pieces of evidence already belied the claims of former police colonel Cezar Mancao II, the "lone witness" who had linked him to the crime. "Don’t look for me. Look at the evidence. It’s right under your nose. It won’t cost you two centavos to fulfill your duty to provide justice to all concerned," Lacson told De Lima in the statement. In asking De Lima for a reinvestigation, Lacson said the facts of the case "are too glaring to ignore." He said in 2009, Mancao had applied to become a state witness and be dropped as a principal accused by testifying that “sometime in September, or early part of October 2000, when ex-President [Joseph] Estrada was out of the country, he overheard me order a murder to be committed." Lacson was referring to Mancao's claim that "Lacson ordered Dacer neutralized" in a conversation inside a car in 2000. Veteran publicist Salvador "Bubby" Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito were abducted and found dead in November 2000. Lacson said Mancao made the testimony after the previous administration allegedly promised him a "good life." According to Lacson, the supposed car conversation did not happen because "unassailable" documents indicated that he was out of the country, accompanying Estrada. "Hence the physical impossibility of having engaged in that supposed 'car conversation,'" he said. On the other hand, Lacson said Mancao told the court on November 11, through his lawyer, that he (Mancao) "only learned of the sordid affair ex post facto or after the fact." "As lawyers like Secretary De Lima would always say, 'untrue in one thing, untrue in everything,'" he added. "My only appeal is for the honorable Secretary of Justice to exercise what she said is her plenary power to ask the court to withdraw the information and conduct a reinvestigation," he said. Earlier, the Philippine National Police proposed a P2-million bounty for information leading to the arrest of Lacson. Despite De Lima's endorsement of the PNP request, Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo said he was not inclined to approve it. In a report on the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Robredo was quoted as saying the bounty was neither "worth it" nor "necessary." He added that the police were saying they are close to arresting Lacson. — LBG/VVP, GMANews.TV