Police probe getting Customs runaround?

Police are digging deeper into how a container van reached a Hong Kong triad’s warehouse in Paco, Manila when records showed it should be on a ship on the high seas.

But the police probe is moving slowly because the office of Customs Commissioner Titus Villanueva has apparently been giving police the runaround.

Elements of the Narcotics Group (NarcGroup) and the Regional Intelligence and Special Operations Office (RISOO) coordinated with Villanueva’s office to determine how the container van, with tampered body number and false bottom, was spirited out of Customs last Dec. 19.

"We wanted to know who facilitated the container van out of the guarded Customs gates but the office of Commissioner Villanueva pointed us from one office to another but nobody was willing to talk," said a ranking official of the NarcGroup.

Under Customs rules, a container van should only be allowed to pass through Customs gates upon payment of duties and taxes and presentation of a gate pass, the police official said. He said they failed to find the said Customs documents at the raided warehouse in Quirino Ave., Paco, Manila.

A check by the NarcGroup with other sources revealed that the container van was supposed to be still on board a ship on the high seas.

Villanueva could not be reached for comment.

NarcGroup chief Director Efren Fernandez strongly believed that the false bottom of the container van was used by the Hong Kong triad to smuggle into the country hundreds of kilos of shabu from mainland China.

Fernandez said sleuths of the crime laboratory of the Philippine National Police (PNP) have yet to conduct a thorough inspection of the upper part of the container van, which was declared as containing "sotanghon" noodles.

Neighbors claimed that a container van arrived a the warehouse twice a week. After it unloaded its cargo, luxury vehicles like a Starex, Toyota Revo, Mitsubishi Adventure and Honda CRV, with Chinese-looking people on board would arrive and leave in less than 30 minutes. Police seized some 707 grams of shabu from plastic containers, pails and basins when they raided the warehouse, which was a stone’s throw from Malacañang Park.

Fernandez believes that the 57 kilos of shabu confiscated from seven undocumented Chinese nationals in Pasay City and Manila came from the warehouse. Earlier, police claimed that the 344 kilos of shabu seized in Zambales early last month also belonged to the Hong Kong triad.