who has pleaded not guilty, had no visible reaction to the footage, at one point applying liniment to his neck as he stifled a yawn. -- PHOTO: AFP MANILA - A PHILIPPINE politician accused of massacring 57 people displayed no emotion on Wednesday as grisly footage was shown in court of the victims' mangled and bloodied bodies being pulled from mass graves.
The video clips were part of evidence introduced by prosecutors against Andal Ampatuan Jnr, who is charged with murder over the election-related killings in the southern province of Maguindanao in November last year. 'I cried when I saw that. I had to go out of the courtroom,' said Emmy Intia, a coordinator of the anti-crime organisation Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, one of several people in the court who found the footage unbearable. 'What they did was too brutal. It was worse than demonic,' Ms Intia said, adding that those behind the crime should be 'skinned alive'. Filmed by a local government employee who accompanied police as they retrieved the victims from the mass graves in the two days after the murders, the video showed bloodied bodies, some of which were already decomposing. As the footage was shown, a sister of one of the female victims broke down and had to be helped out of the courtroom. A male lawyer representing the victims also rushed out of the silent courtroom, covering his mouth as he headed for the bathroom to vomit. However, Ampatuan Jnr, who has pleaded not guilty, had no visible reaction to the footage, at one point applying liniment to his neck as he stifled a yawn. 'He looked bored. It was like the most ordinary thing to watch,' Lilian de Lima, head of the government's Commission on Human Rights, who was in the courtroom, told reporters. Sitting in a lavender shirt, flanked by security escorts and lawyers, the main suspect in the massacre watched the footage impassively as body after body was dug up from the earth. The footage lasting 180 minutes and covering two days of excavations, showed dozens of bodies as well as at least three motor vehicles being dug out of mass graves in an isolated area of Maguindanao, where they had been buried in an attempt to hide the crime. -- AFP
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