Philippine police raid leftist lawmaker's home

MANILA, Mar 10 (Reuters) Philippine police searched the Manila home of a left-wing lawmaker today, three days after a court ordered his arrest for multiple murders in the 1980s.

About 20 police officers, most of them in plain clothes, rummaged through Satur Ocampo's warehouse and bedroom, opened closets, searched under the bed and questioned his wife on his whereabouts.

''I told them my husband was not here,'' Carolina Malay-Ocampo, the lawmaker's wife and a journalism professor at the University of the Philippines, told reporters after the raid on their residence in the capital's Quezon City area.

''They looked for my husband everywhere, even underneath our bed. I told them to give him some time to show up and prove his innocence.'' On Wednesday, a court on the central island of Leyte issued an arrest warrant against Ocampo and the leadership of the communist movement and its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA), for the murder of 69 former comrades suspected of betraying the rebel cause.

Ocampo, a two-term member of the lower house of Congress, contested the charges, telling a clandestine news conference he was in military detention when the rebels began killing members suspected of spying for the government.

Ocampo was an economic journalist for a local newspaper when late dictator Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, forcing him to go underground with the communist rebels.

Captured in 1976, he was tried in a military court and detained until 1985 when he escaped and rejoined the guerrillas.

Re-arrested two years later, Ocampo was freed in 1992 when the government opened peace talks with the communists. He won a seat in Congress in 2001 as a member of the Bayan Muna (Nation First) party-list group.

Ocampo's wife said her husband might be forced to rejoin the underground movement, criticising government attempts to deny left-wing groups an active role in mainstream politics.

''This government is afraid of the presence of Bayan Muna in Congress,'' Ocampo told reporters before going into hiding on Thursday.

In February 2006, Crispin Beltran, a left-wing labour leader and lawmaker, was arrested at his home in Bulacan province, north of the capital, over a murder case in the 1980s.

One year later, after left-wing lawmakers were accused of conniving with rogue soldiers in an alleged plot to grab power, Beltran remains under arrest in bed in a state-owned hospital.

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