UP prexy seeks custody of ex-Collegian editor caught in encounter withtroopers

UP President Francisco Nemenzo has offered to take into his custody a former editor of the state university's Philippine Collegian who was allegedly wounded and captured by Army soldiers last Thursday after a gunbattle in Delin Albano, Isabela.

Nemenzo told reporters he sent a letter Wednesday to Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado, Secretary of the Department of National Defense (DND), to seek custody of Kerima Tariman, 21, a Philippine studies student at the state university and former managing editor of UP's official student publication.

"For now, my concern is to bring her here," said the university president.

He said he coursed the letter through lawyer Ruben Carranza, an assistant secretary for plans of the defense department who was himself, an editor-in-chief of the campus paper when he was a student at UP in the late '80s.

Nemenzo said he is also asking professors at the university's College of Law to provide legal assistance to Tariman.

The state university and the DND have a standing agreement to coordinate on security issues involving UP students.

The Army's 5th Infantry Division said Tariman and another alleged NPA fighter, Peter Niño Amoda, were with a communist rebel unit that engaged soldiers in a firefight last Thursday in Isabela.

The division commander, Brig. Gen. Rodolfo Garcia, said Tariman used the nom de guerre Ka Debra while Amoda was also known as Ka Peter.

But Tariman's former colleagues at the Collegian said she was conducting an independent research in Isabela for a book she was writing on the peasant movement in the region.

"What the Army is saying is not true," said Seymour Barros Sanchez, who was editor-in-chief of the campus paper when Tariman was its managing editor from June 1999 to January this year.

"She went there because she wanted to have a feel of the life of farmers who were the subjects of the book she was writing," Sanchez claimed.