SECOND DIVISION G.R. No. L-35149 June 23, 1988 EDUARDO QUINTERO, petitioner, vs. THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, HON. ELIAS ASUNCION, Judge of the Court of First Instance of Manila, and HON. JOSE FLAMINIANO, City Fiscal of Pasay City, respondents.

The two (2) occupants of the house who witnessed the search conducted, Generoso Quintero and Pfc. Alvaro Valentin, were closeted in a room where a search was being made by a member of the raiding party, while the other NBI agents were left to themselves in the other parts of the house, where no members of the household were in a position to watch them, and thus they conducted a search on their own.

Such a procedure, wherein members of a raiding party can roam around the raided premises unaccompanied by any witness, as the only witnesses available as prescribed by law are made to witness a search conducted by the other members of the raiding party in another part of the house, is held to be violative of both the spirit and the letter of the law, 18 which provides that "no search of a house, room, or any other premises shall be made except in the presence of at least one competent witness, resident of the neighborhood."

Another irregularity committed by the agents of respondent NBI was their failure to comply with the requirement of Sec. 10, Rule 126 of the Rules of Court which provides that "The officer seizing property under the warrant must give a detailed receipt for the same to the person on whom or in whose possession it was found, or in the absence of any person, must, in the presence of at least one-witness, leave a receipt in the place in which he found the seized property." The receipt issued by the seizing party in the case at bar, 19 showed that it was signed by a witness, Sgt. Ignacio Veracruz. This person was a policeman from the Manila Metropolitan Police (MMP), who accompanied the agents of respondent NBI during the conduct of the search, The requirement under the aforequoted Rule that a witness should attest to the making of the receipt, was not complied with. This requirement of the Rules was rendered nugatory, when the one who attested to the receipt from the raiding party was himself a member of the raiding party.

The circumstances prevailing before the issuance of the questioned search warrant, and the actual manner in which the search was conducted in the house of the petitioner, all but imperfectly, and yet, strongly suggest that the entire procedure, from beginning to end, was an orchestrated movement designed for just one purpose — to destroy petitioner Quintero's public image with "incriminating evidence," and, as a corollary to this, that the evidence allegedly seized from his residence was "planted" by the very raiding party that was commanded to "seize" such incriminating evidence.