Palace accuses Kirams of coming out with 'tall tales'

MANILA -- Malacañang urged Wednesday the public not to listen anymore on the "tall tales" being concocted by some family members and supporters of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III.

In a news briefing, presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda made the statement following recent report of the assassination plot against Kiram.

Reading a text message from National Security Adviser Cesar Garcia, Lacierda said that there was no intelligence information on the alleged plot to kill Kiram allegedly by foreign hit squad who reportedly stayed at the Maxim's Hotel in Pasay City.

"Verification made by the intelligence community has yielded negative results so far. A check conducted on the alleged presence of certain named individuals in certain hotels also came up with negative results," Garcia said.

"Verification is still going on but off hand, the intel community is giving this report a very low probability," he added.

Lacierda said that it would be up to the Kiram family to substantiate its claim on the assassination plot.

"We leave it with them to justify that story. Because we had a previous experience where Jacel Kiram showed this picture where it showed, allegedly, Malaysian casualties of the [incident]," he said, referring to Kiram daughter.

"This turned out not to be true. This turned out to be a false picture that Jacel Kiram presented to media and, in fact, this was highlighted in one state TV online/website and also one media paper/broadsheet. It turns out that those casualties were not Malaysian casualties but these were Thai casualties and this was taken in 2007," he added.

During the briefing, Lacierda brought the print copies of picture of Jacel showing a photo from a computer of the alleged Malaysian casualties, and another photo of dead soldiers similar to what Jacel has shown and turned out to be Thai soldiers.

He said the original photo has a timestamp of 2007 in June 14 and was taken by European Pressphoto Agency.

"This is out there, in the website, so it was sloppy [of] them to show something, which would [tend to lead] us to believe that this is coming from the Sabah situation. This picture, this incident did not come from the Sabah standoff. This picture came from a Thai situation in 2007," he explained.

"This is getting really ridiculous. Every day they're coming out with tall tales. You know, people should stop listening to tall tales," Lacierda exclaimed.

Abraham Idjirani, spokesperson of the sultanate, was the one who reportedly disclosed of the alleged plot to kill Kiram by the foreign hit squad composed of military colonel, four commandos and three Filipinos.

Aside from Kiram, Pastor "Boy" Saycon, the Sultan's adviser, was also allegedly part of the assassination plot. (SDR/Sunnex)