‘Fiscal wasn’t the woman I was with inside motel’

CEBU CITY — The assistant city prosecutor is allegedly not the woman found in a motel with another woman’s husband.

And if Mary Ann Castro decides to sue the man’s wife for libel, she can expect him to execute an affidavit to support her case.

The husband, cellphone shop owner Zandro Augusto, surfaced the other day to clear Castro, saying she was not the woman his wife discovered him with in a Mandaue City motel in the early morning hours of Aug. 11.

Augusto said the woman was a student of one of the local universities.

While Augusto admitted that he, indeed, knows Castro, he said the prosecutor was nothing but a casual friend with whom he has had no personal relationship.

Augusto said he was forced to come out with his side of the story to clear Castro’s name and that he was willing to executive an affidavit to support her plan to sue his wife Cherry for libel.

He said he was sorry Castro got implicated in the incident.

The Subangdaku police station in Mandaue City said that at about 5:20 a.m. of Aug. 11, Cherry Augusto, assisted by three of its policemen, came upon her husband allegedly with Castro in one of the rooms of the Moonlight Inn Motel.

In the police report, Cherry claimed it was Zandro who answered her knock on the door, reportedly showing up with only a towel around his waist.

Zandro, however, said that while it was he whom his wife found in the motel, the woman he was with was not Castro but the student, a certain Cynthia Fernandez, and that his wife did not even actually see her because she was inside the bathroom when he opened the door.

Still, Cherry believes it was Castro who was with her husband in the room, and that Fernandez is nothing but a fictitious name meant to hide her true identity.

First encounter

Zandro volunteered that he met Fernandez in the course of doing an inventory of his cellular phone shop in Tagbilaran City.

He said Fernandez is studying in Cebu City but has not communicated with him since the incident.

He said it took only about 30 minutes since he and Fernandez checked in at the motel when his wife came with the policemen. He said he brought his wife outside the room and then called a friend to fetch Fernandez from the motel.

Zandro said he first met Castro in his main cellular phone shop in this city when the prosecutor swapped her old SIM card with a new one.

He said they next saw each other again by accident inside a restaurant.

Zandro said he also had occasional encounters with Castro when he followed up on some cases at the city prosecutor’s office but did not say what the cases were.

He denied he was going out with the prosecutor.

Zandro said his marriage to Cherry has been questionable, having been officiated by a mere municipal vice mayor who is not authorized by law to perform such a ceremony.

He said he wants to be free from Cherry amid rumors she was also allegedly carrying on an affair with another man in Butuan City and that it was her own uncle and aunt who had urged him to go to Butuan to verify the rumors.

Zandro said he was forced to marry Cherry, whom he met in Lapu-Lapu City in 1997, because she got pregnant.

He claimed that after the marriage, he and Cherry never lived together because she was in Butuan while he stayed in Lapu-Lapu. Cherry just visited him in Cebu from time to time, he said.

Zandro said he was sorry that Castro was dragged into his family problems, adding that he plans to apologize to the prosecutor personally.

He admitted having tried to talk to Castro on the phone last Monday, but that the prosecutor was furious about her having been dragged into the controversy. — Freeman News Service