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Ghio Ong - The Philippine Star
May 17, 2026 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Justice (DOJ) has leads on the whereabouts of Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who slipped out of the Senate before dawn on Thursday despite a promise by the Senate leadership to keep him in protective custody.
“There are new leads and actionable information that is available to the Republic… There are information available to us to determine where he is,” Justice Secretary Fredderick Vida said at a briefing on Friday.
While there was “no order for manhunt,” Vida maintained the warrant of arrest on Dela Rosa issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is valid and that the Philippine Center on Transnational Crime has been notified to serve it.
The DOJ, through an immigration lookout order, earlier instructed law enforcers to ensure strict border control to prevent Dela Rosa from leaving the country and committing “a mockery of the justice system.”
Furthermore, Vida said the DOJ has formed a special panel of prosecutors to investigate last Thursday’s shooting incident on the second floor of the Senate building.
Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Mao Aplasca had claimed they were attacked by agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) but admitted it was he who fired the first shot.
Vida maintained the panel’s investigation would “not be limited” to the shooting incident. He said he won’t consider yet the incident as an “attack” on the Senate, as claimed by Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano.
He also declined to use the word “escape” to describe Dela Rosa’s surreptitious departure from the Senate grounds, as doing so would be “premature.”
Vida said the DOJ acknowledges the need to “respect the sensitivities of the Senate as a coequal branch,” as well as the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in resolving Dela Rosa’s petitions seeking to block his arrest by the ICC.
“We expect the appropriate turnover once all the legal issues have been resolved,” he said.
Election lawyer Romulo Macalintal for his part said Dela Rosa’s SC petitions have become moot and academic after his “sudden ‘escape’ from the chamber.”
“The government can now persuasively argue that the ‘imminent danger’ cited in the motion for TRO no longer exists because the senator is no longer under the Senate’s protective custody. If the condition he sought to prevent (an arrest inside the Senate) is no longer a possibility, the court generally loses its justification for issuing a TRO,” Macalintal said.
The government could even “compel the senator to reveal his whereabouts or appear in person to justify the continued necessity of his motion,” he added.
‘Reasonable conclusion’
On Thursday’s shooting incident, NBI director Melvin Matibag said it would be a “reasonable conclusion” that it was staged.
In an interview over Facts First podcast, Matibag cited Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s tweet sharing pointers for spotting a suspect.
In his tweet, Lacson said the one who has the “means, opportunity and motive is the most probable suspect.”
“They have the means because there’s OSAA. They have an opportunity because they learned NBI is checking in a contestable area. And they have the motive because, like what the agents already feel, they created a scenario for Sen. Bato to leave the Senate,” the NBI chief said.
“The NBI (agents) introduced themselves and yet, they (OSAA) were the ones who fired the gun,” Matibag said.
“Maybe the original plan was to fire there because it’s an open area, so that no one would be hurt, and then the story would be that a gunfight had occurred there. That’s a possibility. Actually, that’s a more logical explanation,” he added.
The Senate President and Sen. Imee Marcos are demanding the dismissal of Matibag as NBI chief.
For Bicol Saro party-list Rep. Terry Ridon, Dela Rosa lost Senate protection the moment he stepped out of the Senate premises last Thursday.
Ridon cited the protection extended by the House of Representatives to witnesses in the flood control scandal, which is effective as long as the witnesses are in the premises of the Batasan Pambansa.
“At the height of the flood control hearings, some of the resource persons involved in the Bulacan flood control were given protective custody but when they decided that they did not want to remain in the House area, when they left, the protection lapsed,” he said. — EJ Macababbad, Daphne Galvez
