nobleza
SUPT. MARIA CRISTINA NOBLEZA
A forensic exam on the cellular phone seized from Supt. Maria Cristina Nobleza — the police officer caught in Bohol with a suspected Abu Sayyaf bomb maker — showed that she kept videos of terrorist activities including how minors are trained to become future combatants.
Supt. Royina Marzan Garma, head of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Central Visayas (CIDG-7), said they recovered items that would link Nobleza to terrorists although the videos discovered were not of Filipinos but Syrians.
“The cellphone was subjected to forensic examination, and that’s what we found,” Garma said in an interview.
Among the videos found saved in Nobleza’s phone was one which showed a minor shooting to death a Syrian hostage in the head.
“We saw how children were groomed to become members of the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). The children were really brainwashed and trained to become combatants,” Garma said.
Also on Nobleza’s phone was an inspirational message from Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, the organization that claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the United States, along with numerous other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.
Bin Laden was shot and killed by authorities on May 2, 2011.
Garma said many messages on Nobleza’s phone were also in Tausug which police had yet to translate.
Last April 24, Nobleza, together with an elderly woman, and a 13-year-old boy, were on board a black Nissan Navara pickup driven by Reener Dongon, a suspected Abu Sayyaf bomb maker, when they were taken into police custody for refusing to stop at a checkpoint in Clarin, Bohol.
Nobleza and her companions were within 150 meters from the site of a firefight which erupted between members of the Abu Sayyaf group in Inabanga town who arrived days earlier from Mindanao and government troops.
Found inside Nobleza’s vehicle were bottles of energy drink, canned goods, diving gear, goggles, biscuits, boxes of chocolates, male underwear, T-shirts, shorts for men and medical kits.
Police believe that Nobleza was on her way to rescue remaining Abu Sayyaf members who were trapped, hungry and injured, in the midst of a military and police pursuit operation.
Nobleza, deputy regional chief of the PNP Crime Lab in Davao Region, was charged before the prosecutors’ office for illegal possession of firearms, resistance and disobedience to agents of a person in authority, and harboring a criminal.
Garma said they intend to file additional charges against Nobleza for violating the Anti-Terror Law of the Philippines.
On orders of Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, Nobleza and Dongon were brought to Camp Crame while the charges against them were being readied by the prosecutor.
While in detention at the camp, police found out that Nobleza and Dongon were married under Muslim rites years ago.
A 2013 news report by Brig. Gen. Ricardo Visaya, then commander of the army’s 4th Infantry Division, said Dongon was the leader of Khilafah Islamiya, a Jihadi organization that seeks to establish an independent Islamic state in Mindanao.
Police arrested Dongon with an associate in Marawi City on May 11, 2013 but was subsequently released because the name on the search warrant which led to the seizure of bomb making materials, was that of his younger brother.
Dongon was also allegedly responsible for the bombing of Maxandrea Hotel in Cagayan de Oro City in 2012 that resulted in the death of two individuals.