After the arrest of Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and Brigadier General Danilo Lim and other renegade soldiers, more than 50 members of the media were arrested and some were handcuffed or hand tied with cables as they were suspected as some of them might be members of the mutineers who avoid being caught.
According to reports, these media men were first threatened to be arrested if they will not surrender tapes of the standoff that ended shortly after 5 p.m.
After the arrest, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) condemned the Philippine National Police who treated members of the press covering the standoff as “enemies of the state.”
According to Local Government Secretary Rolando Puno, what the police officers did were technically not an arrest but a processing.
Among those who were arrested were ABS-CBN correspondents, news anchors Pinky Webb and Ces Drilon and their news team, DJ Yap and Julie Aurelio of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, GMA-7 team reporter Sandra Aguinaldo,DzMM reporter Noel Alamar, Malaya columnist Ellen Tordesillas, Chona Yu of Radio Veritas, and Raoul Esperas of dwIZ.
In some reports, some of the media men were maltreated. Their IDs were violently pulled, told to lie face down, hands were tied with plastic cable and according to one member of the press the police just brought them to the holding area without giving any reason why they were being arrested. They were also arrested without the Miranda Doctrine which was usually said before arresting.
After the said processing, media men were released around 10 p.m.
According to Charie Villar, ABS-CBN’s head of news gathering, they were studying the possibility of filing charges against those police who rounded up ABS-CBN personnel.
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