A CONSTRUCT statement will result in some RDF serialisation being produced directly by the SPARQL server, if the facility is available. Currently libsparqlclient does not handle these kinds of responses (although the query is sent correctly) and attempts to parse the response as a SPARQL result-set.
Resolving this will require the addition of a new APIs to determine whether the result of a statement was a model, and to obtain it if so. Once implemented, this capability can be used by sparql_query_model() and friends to short-cut the extrapolation of a result-set into a model.