A knee injury that sent detained Senator Jinggoy Estrada to a San Juan hospital on Wednesday did not stem from a fall in the bathroom, the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) said, pushing back against accounts that circulated after he was taken from the New Quezon City Jail.
According to jail records cited by the bureau, the senator had already been dealing with knee problems well before his June detention, which figured into how officials read Wednesday’s episode. BJMP spokesperson Jail Supt. Jayrex Bustinera said the pain came on abruptly as Estrada moved through a corridor inside the facility, not while he was bathing.
The senator was getting ready for a hospital consultation shortly before 11:30 a.m. when the incident occurred, Bustinera said. Estrada reported hearing a snap in his knee at that moment. A physician assigned to the jail looked him over on site and helped him before he was moved to a hospital for imaging.
That hospital visit had been sanctioned by the courts. On August 26, the Sandiganbayan’s Fifth Division cleared Estrada to have a knee X-ray taken at Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan, acting on a request from his lawyers who said pain in both knees had worsened to the point of making it hard for him to walk. His orthopedic specialist, Dr. Jose Fernando Syquia, had called for the scans to check whether an existing knee condition had deteriorated.
Prosecutors did not back the outside trip. They floated an alternative of wheeling a portable X-ray machine into the jail rather than transporting the senator.
Doctors have yet to release their conclusions, and the bureau said those will come once the attending physicians wrap up their assessment. The senator was set to be returned to the New Quezon City Jail as soon as the procedure ended.
Estrada is standing trial before the anti-graft court with four others on plunder and corruption charges tied to an alleged kickback arrangement built around flood control projects.
