More to Galban role than money?

Supt. Reuben "Fritz" Galban has been an intelligence officer most of his police life. Skilled in tracking down foreign terrorists operating in the Philippines, his unit is credited with helping neutralize Agus Dwikarna, Jemaah Islamiyah’s Indonesian agent in Manila, and half a dozen al-Qaeda cronies in the Abu Sayyaf. Yet he is now accused of aiding last week’s escape from Camp Crame of JI bomb expert Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi. What made him do it?

Chief Supt. Eduardo Matillano, who heads the PNP’s internal investigation, suspects greed. Believing that Galban received "a very huge amount to sacrifice his career," he points to strange circumstances.

Galban is head of the PNP-Intelligence Group’s Foreign Intelligence Liaison Office (FILO), which occupies the old IG building’s second floor and is in charge of three detention cells there, including the one that held al-Ghozie. He was working late the night of the escape sometime between 10 o’clock Sunday (July 13) and 5 a.m. Monday. Unusual in the PNP-IG that, in recent years, has become notorious for sloppy work habits. Galban adamantly explained to interrogators that he was wrapping up paperwork on two "subjects": "I usually work Saturdays, Sundays and holidays." A sentry at the strict-security IG compound gate logged him to have left twice that night between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. "I was on my way home when I remembered that I had not turned off my computer, so I went back," Galban retorted. But a witness also noticed him in his Toyota Revo van loitering outside the compound with his subordinate PO2 Mary Grace Oblimar and driver PO1 Nathaniel Natanawan. Investigators theorize that al-Ghozi and two Abu Sayyaf cellmates had climbed up an unmanned guardhouse opposite the gate and jumped over the compound fence. At 10 a.m. Monday, Galban reported to work just when the morning-shift guards were discovering that the trio had disappeared.

An inspection of al-Ghozi’s jail at the old IG building’s second floor revealed construction defects. The cell door could be opened by lifting it from the hinges without having to break the padlock. The cell had three cublices, each with a door. Detainees could talk to the janitors, guards and IG personnel at the mess hall from across a narrow corridor. On the night of the escape, Galban’s chief clerk SPO3 Puentegardo Campo was boozing with duty-guard PO1 Ronald Palmares and an off-duty agent. Campo was on duty that night as alert team leader. As such, he was to head any call for quick response, including an escape. Campo flunked a lie-detector test. Palmares at first said he was asleep when al-Ghozi escaped, but now insists he is being set up by unnamed higher-ups. The only other guard on duty, SPO3 Ruperto Principe, said he was out buying snacks. Galban, who claims to be a diligent officer who works off hours, apparently allowed his men to drink while on-duty. But did he know about the defective jail door?

Matillano got part of an answer from Abu Ali, an Abu Sayyaf rookie who, upon posting bail for a bombing charge, was hired as IG handyman. That in itself was a breach of security. Ali confessed that it was he who told Abdulmukim Edris, one of al-Ghozi’s fellow-escapees, about the defective door. That was in May, when al-Ghozi asked Ali to help them escape. Two long months ago, and the trio never bothered to bolt – until the day Australian Prime Minister John Howard was to sign a $5-million anti-terrorism aid to President Gloria Arroyo. Ali also advised them that they’d need a getaway car to scoot out of Camp Crame.

When al-Ghozi was arrested in Jan. 2002, IG agents first threw him into that second-floor jail. But they noticed that security was lax, precisely because detainees could fraternize with personnel at the mess hall. Al-Ghozi was befriending the guards. It was from the mess hall that Ali later got cooking oil to lubricate the defective door for added silence. At any rate, the IG last year hurriedly built tighter cells at the ground floor. A team of US law enforcers came to visit about that time and urged them to transfer al-Ghozi, which they did upon finishing the new jail in four months. Galban moved him back up weeks ago. Moro Islamic Liberation Front officer Muklis Yunos had just been arrested, confessed to the Rizal Day 2000 bombings, and implicated al-Ghozi. Galban claimed he needed to check Yunos’s narrative against al-Ghozi’s, and thus needed easier access with al-Ghozi back on the second floor. Matillano found this inconsistent.

For Galban kept Yunos on the first floor despite continuing interrogation.

Still, where’s the huge amount that changed hands? Matillano has set his sights on Galban’s known padrino, Dir. Julius Yarcia, for lifestyle check. Yarcia has no field or desk assignment at present. But he was PNPDirector for Intelligence in 1999, during which Galban headed his policy-making Foreign Liaison Division. The DI’s operating arm is the IG, at that time headed by the late Chief Supt. Romulo Sales, with Supt. Michael Ray Aquino as deputy. Before rising as Western Visayas commander in 2000, Yarcia placed Galban as IG’s FILO head. Dir. Rey Berroya, who took over IG in 2001, sacked him, but was reinstated by a successor after 9/11.

Berroya reportedly got a tip that Yunos had claimed to have been helped in the Rizal Day sabotage by a splinter of the Communist Party’s New People’s Army. But this crucial detail was not included in the FILO’s tactical interrogation report of May 27 on the confessed bomber. Matillano is wondering if Galban had something to do with the deletion. For he and Berroya remember that Yarcia, as intelligence director, was the designated handler of the communist faction in peace talks with the administration of President Joseph Estrada. Once in a special operation of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, Yarcia had the rebels photographed sipping cocktails with Estrada in the Baguio presidential mansion. The splinter is based in Western Visayas, where he eventually was assigned.

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