2 Sino drug suspects walk

The Quezon City Regional Trial Court has acquitted two Chinese nationals arrested and accused by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) of drug trafficking.

Branch 76 Judge Monina Zenarosa found the arrest of Chua Kien and Wu Wex on Sept. 22, 1999 during an alleged buy-bust operation by NBI agents to be a "haphazard venture."

"Courts must be extra vigilant in trying drug charges," said the judge in a seven-page decision promulgated last week but released only yesterday, "lest an innocent person is made to suffer unusually severe penalties for drug offenses."

The charge carried the penalty of death. The NBI said the Chinese businessmen were arrested on a tip-off by one Roger Sy, who was arrested earlier on the same day in a raid at his residence in Tierra Evelina, Tandang Sora, Quezon City.

NBI agents who led the raid said Sy led them to a supposed new delivery of two kilograms of shabu in Sanville Subdivision, also in Quezon City. There, the two Chinese businessmen were arrested in the act of selling the illegal drugs, which they had placed in a plastic bag.

The NBI said Sy arranged for the buy-bust by calling up his supposed "Chinese connections", whom he later identified as the two Chinese businessmen.

But the two businessmen, in their testimony to the court through interpreters, said they were arrested separately by NBI agents and only met each other at the NBI headquarters in Manila.

Chua Kien, who bought and sold textiles and ready-to-wear clothes, said that he was waiting for a friend at a hamburger joint on Visayas Avenue shortly after lunch on Sept. 21, 1999 when a man poked a gun at him and took him to a car, where two other men were waiting. The men brought him to the NBI headquarters, where he was beaten up and told to call his wife. He said the NBI agents demanded P2 million for his freedom.

Wu Wex said that in the early afternoon of Sept. 21, he was with a friend he identified as Emily Ang to look for a car he wanted to buy. He said his friend brought him to a place in Quezon City which was not familiar to him. The woman left him there, telling him to wait for her there because she had something else to do.

Ten minutes later, three men walked up to him and dragged him to a waiting car. He said the men blindfolded him and drove him to a building, which turned out to be the NBI headquarters on Taft Avenue.

The judge said the evidence presented by the NBI failed to meet the standard of moral certainty of the guilt of the accused. "Here the poseur never had any initial contact with the alleged pushers prior to the Sanville encounter," said the judge. "It was Roger Sy who arranged for the supposed sale by talking over the phone with the suspected seller and in the Chinese language at that."

She said there was even no proof that the poseur, NBI agent Ferdinand Garcia, even as much as showed money to the suspects. "There was no consummated sale in this case."