SENATE President Juan Ponce Enrile yesterday urged Michael Ray Aquino to speak up and tell the truth about the Dacer-Corbito double-murder case, in which he is a suspect.

He made the statement in reaction to a sworn statement by Cesar Mancao, another former police officer and also a suspect in the case, in which he supposedly heard Aquino say that former National Police chief and now Senator Panfilo Lacson gave the order to eliminate publicist Salvador Dacer after President Joseph Estrada had supposedly cleared it.

Glenn Dumlao, another former police officer and also a suspect in the case, is in jail in the United States like Mancao, and he supposedly had confessed in his own affidavit that Estrada and Lacson both had a hand in the case.

Dacer and his driver, Emmanuel Corbito, were abducted in broad daylight on the South Superhighway on Nov. 24, 2000, and by people believed to be members of the police force.

Their charred bodies were found four days later in Indang, Cavite.

Aquino, Mancao and Dumlao were senior superintendents working under Lacson, who was head of a police task force against organized crime under Estrada, when the two men were murdered.

Enrile made his statement even as Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez virtually confirmed that Mancao had tagged Estrada and Lacson as having had a hand in the case.

“That’s quite accurate,” Gonzalez said when asked if a copy of Mancao’s affidavit was similar to the one he was keeping.

“That’s why I’m surprised where that came from. I’m trying to look for the source of the leak, but that’s water under the bridge because the document has already been leaked out.”

But Gonzalez belittled Dumlao’s success in fighting his extradition to the Philippines, saying he was not a vital witness in the case.

The government could rely on Mancao, who had agreed to testify on the case, he said.

Mancao claims in his affidavit that Aquino had referred to Estrada as “Bigote” [“the mustached one”] and to Dacer as “Delta” while he was talking to Lacson in the backseat of a car in October 2000.

Lacson said the supposed conversation between him and Aquino “did not occur.”

“First, when I was [police] chief I always sat in the backseat while my aide-de-camp was always in the front seat,” Lacson told radio station dzMM.

“Second, I am not stupid that when there was such a sensitive instruction, I would give it in the presence of a potential witness who was not concerned with the instruction.”

Enrile said Aquino was key to solving the murder case based on what he had read in the papers.

“Unless Michael Ray Aquino speaks, all of those statements of Mancao and Dumlao would be hearsay to the extent that they were referring to the conversation of Michael Ray Aquino [with Lacson],” Enrile said

Mancao and Dumlao’s claims against Estrada and Lacson were “just allegations, not evidence,” and those had to be substantiated by hard evidence, he said.

Aquino, the police officer closest to Lacson during their days in the police force, is in jail in the United States for circulating classified US intelligence reports on the Philippines. Fel V. Maragay and Rey E. Requejo