FBI wants Defensor nephew extradited

The marital row between the nephew of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago and his ex-wife has gotten worse, with the Department of Justice getting higher court approval to proceed with the perjury charge against Benjamin John Defensor III on top a US arrest warrant for child kidnapping.

Defensor, son of retired Armed Forces chief Benjamin Defensor, is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation for international parental kidnapping for allegedly having taken his three children in May 2005 from Delaware to the Philippines, “with the intent of obstructing the custody rights of the children’s mother, in violation of a Delaware Family Court order expressly prohibiting him from taking the children out of Delaware.”

Defensor, who is redeveloping the Binictican golf course in Subic on behalf of foreign partners, was able to have his marriage with Anna Lizza Ebron annulled in Trece Martires, Cavite in 2004. With the marriage annulled, Defensor in early 2005 then filed a petition for custody of their three USbased children before the Pasay Regional Trial Court.

In the Pasay petition, Defensor claimed that his estranged wife lived in Villamor Air Base, where she could be served with court summons.

Unfortunately for Defensor, the wife opposed the child custody petition, claiming that not only did she not live in the Villamor address, Defensor and she were permanent US residents with a conjugal home in Delaware.

It was apparently the child custody case in Pasay that prompted Defensor, who is 41 this year, to spirit the three children, then all minors, out of the United States and into the Philippines.

To make a long story short, the Court of Appeals in late May upheld the decision of the Department of Justice to file a perjury case against Defensor, despite the latter’s claim that he gave the local address in good faith, relying on the alleged tip from his estranged wife’s neighbors.

In the meantime, the FBI has made representations with the Interpol and other international partners to extradite Defensor.

“The abduction of a child from the United States to a foreign country is a serious offense,” Delaware district attorney Charles Oberly III said in a statement. “Individuals who illegally remove children from the United States to thwart a parent’s legal custody rights are in violation of federal law. This District has and will continue to pursue parental kidnapping offenders.”

Each kidnapping count carries up to three years prison sentence.