The U.S. District Court yesterday imposed a 37-month prison term against one of two men who set fire to the i-Connect telecommunications facility on Mt. Tapochau last Feb. 7.<\/p>\n
Chief Judge Alex R. Munson convicted John Peter Reyes Mendiola for conspiracy to commit arson.<\/p>\n
Munson ordered that Mendiola be on supervised release for three years after serving his prison term at a federal prison facility. Mendiola was also directed to render 200 hours of community service.<\/p>\n
The judge held Mendiola jointly liable with his co-defendants to pay a total of $567,396.54 in restitution for the damage caused by the i-Connect blast.<\/p>\n
The court had earlier meted out prison terms against Mendiola\u2019s cohorts, Andrew Quiambao and Marvin Leon Guerrero. The Federal Bureau of Investigation tagged Guerrero, the owner of i-Connect\u2019s rival firm Communications Specialist Inc., as mastermind in the arson attempt.<\/p>\n
Guerrero, together with Mendiola and Quiambao, were directed to pay i-Connect some $316,200.92; CGU International Insurance PLC, $160,000; Motorola, $45,931.62; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, $45,264.<\/p>\n
The Feb. 7 blast destroyed not only i-Connect\u2019s facility but also communications equipment owned by the FBI. Quiambao and Mendiola used gasoline to set fire to the facility.<\/p>\n
Investigations revealed that Guerrero masterminded an earlier attempt to burn down the i-Connect facility. I-Connect executives claimed that i-Connect took away some 70 percent of CSI\u2019s customers on Saipan when it began local operations. Both i-Connect and CSI operate two-way radio systems on Saipan and Guam. (John Ravelo)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.S. District Court yesterday imposed a 37-month prison term against one of two men who set fire to the i-Connect telecommunications facility on Mt. Tapochau last Feb. 7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}