The Bureau of Immigration (BI) announced today that it is investigating a Chinese national who was accused by Senator Panfilo Lacson yesterday of smuggling PHP1.8 billion (US$34.5 million) worth of methamphetamine into the country.
The meth, or shabu, was discovered by the authorities on March 22 at the Manila International Container Terminal in Tondo, Manila.
According to Rappler, in a privilege speech yesterday, Lacson had claimed that suspected smuggler Zhijian Xu was on Interpol’s watch list and was a fugitive in China, and questioned how he had been able to leave the country on a Philippine Airlines flight on April 3, evading the BI’s scrutiny.
But BI spokeswoman Dana Sandoval said that her agency had looked into the allegations that Xu, who allegedly uses the alias Jacky Co, was behind the smuggling, and found not only that Xu didn’t appear to wanted by Interpol, but there was no record of him entering or leaving the country, The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports.
“Although initial verification showed that the names have no Interpol hit and no matching travel records, we are expanding the investigation with the help of other law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” she said.
In his speech yesterday, Lacson, a former police chief, cited information from local law enforcement agencies and documents gathered by his office as the basis of his accusations against Xu, whom he said had flown out of the country to Vietnam via Singapore.
He also claimed that Xu, in addition to being in the drug trade, was “part of a big kidnapping syndicate here in the Philippines that receives money through wire transfer and offshore banking.”
Lacson went on to lament the Bureau of Customs’ susceptibility to bribery, and criticized it and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency for an unorthodox purported sting in which they auctioned off a meth shipment that they seized in March which Xu allegedly smuggled into the Philippines, the Manila Bulletin reports.
The agencies said they auctioned off the meth — which was disguised as “tapioca starch” — in what they maintained was a ruse to draw out the drug syndicate members who were allegedly behind the shipment. The “starch,” however, was bought instead by a local commodities company that only discovered it was meth later when a bag was damaged during handling, and reported it to customs.
Lacson said he wasn’t buying the agencies story that the auction was a “controlled delivery” operation.
“‘Controlled delivery’ my foot!” Lacson said, according to ABS-CBN News. “[Did] Customs and PDEA officials really expect the owners of this shipment to actually participate in the said public auction knowing fully well that forfeited and seized commodities undergo 100 percent physical examination prior to disposition?”
He also pointed to a PDEA declaration stating that the shipment contained no drugs, when it very clearly did.
“It does not take much to figure out the holes in the plot that some not-so-smart characters in these agencies tried to fabricate but failed miserably,” Lacson said.
“Simply put, this is a case of dishonesty with the intention of misleading the public.”
