DAVAO CITY - Fear of the mayor of this city prompted one of those being hunted in connection with the operation of an illegal drugs laboratory here to surrender. Saying "Mayor [Rodrigo] Duterte would kill me," Jessie Jones Pilapil, brother-in-law of principal suspect, Allan Sy, surrendered to National Bureau of Investigation agents in Tago, Surigao del Sur, a day after his relatives sought the bureau's help in assuring his safety when he surrenders. NBI Director Reynaldo Wycoco presented Pilapil to news reporters here Monday at the regional office of the NBI. Pilapil was presented along with his sister, Jed, wife of Allan Sy. [continues 379 words]
DAVAO CITY - Mayor Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday warned the Bureau of Customs "to shape up" following suspicion that most of the equipment and chemicals found in the raided drugs laboratory passed through the seaport unchecked. "To the Bureau of Customs, you better shape up," Duterte said in his regular Sunday television program two days after antinarcotics agents raided here the first big methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu laboratory in Mindanao. Duterte believes that the equipment "were high tech and could only be brought here through containers that were allowed to pass through Customs unchecked." [continues 506 words]
DAVAO CITY - After more than a decade of killing spree, the shadowy antidrug vigilante group, Davao Death Squad (DDS), would no longer be shadowy anymore after an alleged vigilante was cornered and arrested on Thursday night. The alleged vigilante was Romeo Taysa, 38, of Matina Gravaham, a slum area along the Bankerohan River. Taysa, along with a companion who was able to escape, however, has shot dead earlier a "dispatcher" of passenger vans in front of the City Overland Transport Terminal in Ecoland, south of this city. [continues 306 words]
DAVAO CITY - Government operatives arrested 26 persons during a raid on a marijuana plantation in Malita, Davao del Sur, on Monday. It was considered one of the biggest antidrug operations undertaken by law-enforcement agencies in Southern Mindanao. The alleged planters and caretakers of the plantation did not resist arrest and turned in their weapons to the joint team of the Davao del Sur provincial police, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) 111, the Philippine Center on Transnational Crime (PCTC)-East Mindanao, Air Intel, Security Group 11 and the 25th Infantry Battalion. [continues 168 words]
DAVAO CITY - Irked by perennial criticism on police inability to solve the killings of persons engaged in the illegal-drug trade, Mayor Rodrigo Duterte branded his critics as "reactive idiots" and urged them to seek out wanted persons and warn them to reform or leave the city. "These reactive idiots, I may call them, don't just sit there and wait for the next victim to fall. Seek them out and help reform them or warn them to leave the city," he said in his regular Sunday television program Monday morning. [continues 522 words]
