Authorities arrested a suspected American pedophile while he met with his would-be victim at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in Pasay City yesterday, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) said in a statement today.
BI Port Operations Division Chief Grifton Medina identified the suspect as 43-year-old Piotr Kmita. The suspect was apprehended in an entrapment operation minutes after he arrived at the NAIA Terminal 1 via a China Eastern Airlines flight from Pudong, China.
Bienvenido Castillo, the chief of the BI-NAIA’s Border Control and Intelligence Unit, said that the arresting agents tailed Kmita from the moment he arrived up to the area outside the airport where he met his victim, a female minor. He was arrested shortly after.
Castillo said that the operation stemmed from a request from the United States government’s Homeland Security Investigation (HSI). He said the HSI sought the assistance of the BI to monitor the suspect after he was reportedly discovered to have engaged in sexually explicit conversations with the young victim he befriended online through Facebook.
In the statement, BI Commissioner Jaime Morente also warned foreign nationals planning to travel to the Philippines for illegal activities. “Do not prey on our women and children. We do not welcome sex tourists in the country.”
Morente said that Kmita’s deportation will have to wait until the criminal charges against him are resolved, adding that if convicted, the American will have to serve his sentence first in the Philippines before he could be sent back to the U.S.
Kmita will be charged for violating Republic Act 10364 or the expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, which penalizes the act of “procuring a child for prostitution and obtaining a person for the purpose of prostitution, pornography or sexual exploitation.”
