Senator Grace Poe has urged Senator Leila De Lima to explain why the drug trade in National Bilibid Prison thrived during her term as Department of Justice (DOJ) Secretary.
Poe noted that the illegal drugs proliferated not only in the New Bilibid Prisons but in other parts of the country while De Lima headed the DOJ, Inquirer reported.
“I think it’s just right that she accounts for this and answers the allegations against her,” she said in an interview over ABS-CBN News Channel’s morning show, Headstart.
Poe said it would be difficult to brush off the allegations when there were “collaborating testimonies” about De Lima’s supposed involvement in the illicit drug trade.
At least two witnesses — suspected drug lord, Kerwin Espinosa, and De Lima’s former driver and partner, Ronnie Dayan — have testified in a Senate probe and claimed giving her drug money for her campaign kitty.
“It’s quite tough for her to be able to take a case against some of the allegations but let’s give her a chance. I don’t want to pass judgment right away,” Poe said.
“But as I said, it was during her time when she was DOJ secretary that a lot of these drug problems actually flourished so at least for that particular issue she has to be able to explain why that was so,” she said.
“I think that we all have to be able to be accountable to the public,” Poe added.
Poe and De Lima are part of the majority in the Senate but the former voted to oust the latter as chair of the Senate committee on justice that was investigating alleged extrajudicial killings in the country.