Families of victims and witnesses in the Maguindanao massacre Thursday pressed for the immediate implementation of the Supreme Court-expressed approval to transfer the case to Metro Manila, saying the new venue will be a lot better for all justice seekers.

“Holding the court hearings in Metro Manila would mean extra expenses for us to personally attend, but in the final analysis it will be more favorable,” the wife of a journalist slain in the massacre told the Bulletin last Thursday.

She said the “families of feargripped witnesses and government prosecutors” would benefit more in the transfer of the litigations from Cotabato City to Metro Manila.

The plea of the families of victims and witnesses came in consonance with the publicized demands of foreign and media groups for the prompt dispensation of justice on the grisly deaths of their 30 colleagues via independent probe and safer venue.

Earlier, Justice Secretary Agnes Devanadera said the Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked the Supreme Court to transfer the case to Metro Manila for security reasons.

Asked by newsmen about Devanadera’s statement, SC spokesman Jose Midas Marquez has said the High Tribunal would consider the DOJ petition.

The SC spokesman, however, did not state when the High Tribunal will cause the official transfer of the case venue.

Last Tuesday, Judge Melanio Guerrero received documents for the 25 counts of murder filed against Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr., the main suspect in the massacre, who is detained in Manila.

Marquez said Chief Justice Reynato Puno had assigned Guerrero from Sultan Kudarat to the Cotabato City RTC Branch 15, which had no judge.

Dozens of policemen surrounded the courthouse while the prosecutors were filing the charges inside, reports said.

On Wednesday, state prosecutors indicted former Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr. and seven members of his powerful clan in the massacre of 57 people in a widening investigation that prompted the replacement of 1,092 policemen and relief of some military officers in the area.

Also on Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno ordered ARMM Gov. Zaldy Uy Ampatuan to answer within five days allegations that he failed “to protect the civil, human and political rights” of the victims.

Puno said investigators had found “sufficient cause” to charge him on a complaint filed by Esmael Mangudadatu, vice mayor of Buluan town who had sent the convoy to file his certificate of candidacy for governor of Maguindanao.

Meanwhile, police medical experts said they found semen on the sex organs of five female victims of the massacre, an indication, they said, that they could have been sexually abused before they were brutally killed.

Chief Supt. Arturo Cacdac, head of the Philippine National Police Crime Laboratory, said the five female victims who were possibly abused before the carnage includes a journalist.

“We would like to report that the initial examination conducted in the process called acid phosphatase examination, we determined that five of the female victims, which we autopsied were positive for semen, presence for semen,” said Cacdac in a press briefing in Camp Crame.

But Cacdac was quick to clarify that the presence of semen on the victim’s sex organs does not necessarily mean that they were raped.

“Two of the female victims are married and it is possible that they stayed with their husband before the incident,” said Cacdac.

Asked if their findings that the semen found on the five female victims indicate that they were raped, Cacdac said: “It is a presumptive evidence.”

But PNP Crime Laboratory officer Ruby Grace Diangson said that of the five female victims, only one has a strong possibility that she was indeed raped because of the bruises in her sex organ and the fact that her pants were down when her cadaver was exhumed from the mass grave site in Sitio Masalay, Barangay Salman in Ampatuan town.

The police medical officers believe that the woman was mistaken as the wife of Mangudadatu, what with what she suffered in the hands of the gunmen, particularly the fact that a barrel of a gun was placed inside her mouth before it was fired.

The PNP Crime Laboratory has autopsied 37 massacre victims, six of them female. The other 20 were autopsied by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) including Mangudadatu’s wife Genalyn.

A former governor of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao meanwhile blamed the current administration for the massacre citing that it could not have happened during the Aquino presidency. (With a report from Chito A. Chavez)