Chinese kidnap group busted

A Chinese-led kidnap for ransom syndicate was believed busted following the arrest of four alleged members, including a dismissed police major, in a series of police operations in Metro Manila and Tarlac.

Chief Superintendent Nestorio Gualberto, director of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), said the arrest of former police Chief Inspector Rodolfo Magleo, Antonio Ajoc, Jr., 27, his younger brother Brian, 24, and Richard Lee, 38, came following the safe rescue of their latest victim, Lorenzo Tobiano-Pe, a 19-year-old veterinary medicine student from Malabon.

Interior and Local Government Secretary Jose Lina Jr., and National Police chief, Director General Leandro Mendoza, presented the arrested suspects in a press conference yesterday at the CIDG in Camp Crame.

Magleo is a graduate of the Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA) Class of 1988. His last assignment was at the PNP-Narcotics Group where he was dismissed for grave misconduct last year.

A student of the Gregorio Araneta Foundation University in Malabon, Tobiano-Pe was grabbed by 12 heavily armed men reportedly led by Magleo in the vicinity of the school campus on August 2.

A scion of a wealthy Filipino-Chinese family in Malabon, the victim was brought by his abductors to the Pinatubo Resettlement Area in Capas, Tarlac where he was held and fed inside an empty septic tank.

The suspects then contacted the victim’s family and demanded a huge amount as ransom.

During ransom negotiations, anti-kidnapping police agents discovered that Magleo’s men were merely hatchet men of a well-entrenched Chinese-led kidnapping syndicate headed by a certain Alex Go.

This was further bolstered when police rescued the kidnap victim shortly after he managed to escape after three days of detention and later identified Go and two other Filipino-Chinese, he identified as Willy and Wilson Lopez, as the brains behind his abduction. The Lopezes are close friends of the victim.

Police records showed that Go, and the two Lopezes were the alleged brains behind almost all high-profile abductions of Chinese-Filipino businessmen or their relatives.

Gualberto said the Chinese kidnap gang bosses merely commissioned the services, for a huge fee, of Magleo and his gang members to abduct chosen victims they carefully researched and befriended in the Chinese community.

On the pretext of assisting the family of their victims, the group, according to Gualberto, offers its services to negotiate with the kidnappers for the safe release of the victim.

In the Tobiano-Pe kidnapping case, the suspects blew their cover after police monitored them to be the real brains behind the abduction by directly negotiating the ransom and picking up the money from the victim’s family.

The three Chinese suspects are now the object of a police manhunt. According to Gualberto, some quarters in the Binondo Chinese community are currently negotiating with his office for their surrender.

This kidnapping problem of the Chinese never stops because they themselves are the brains behind the abduction of their fellow Chinese," Gualberto said. – Jaime Laude