EDITORIAL - Foreign crime rings’ playground

As if we didn’t have enough problems with home-grown gangsters, even foreign crime rings appear to be operating with impunity these days in our country, bristling with guns and targeting foreigners and Filipinos alike.

Last week, police raided a unit occupied by a Taiwanese on the 15th floor of a condominium building in Makati and seized 84 guns including 13 rifles and six submachine guns as well as a large ammunition cache.

The raid followed the arrest on March 1 of four undocumented Taiwanese, one of them a chemist, believed to be members of a crime ring engaged in drug trafficking and telecommunications fraud. The Taiwanese ringleader is at large. How did they build up such an arsenal in the Philippines, and for what purpose?

On Thursday last week, three Chinese nationals were arrested in Parañaque as well as their Vietnamese cohort in BGC Taguig on charges of kidnapping for ransom, torturing and murdering a Chinese-Filipino businessman on March 18 in Quezon City.

Police said the suspects were apprehended as they were withdrawing part of the ransom paid by relatives of Mario Sy Uy. Despite the ransom payments totaling nearly P1 million, however, Uy was not freed. Instead the kidnappers tortured him and cut off one of his toes after the initial payment of P300,000, police said. The torture in a subdivision in Gen. Trias, Cavite was recorded and sent to Uy’s relatives. On March 22, his body with gunshot wounds was found by students in a grassy spot of the Saddle and Leisure Park in Tanza, Cavite.

Probers said the torture and severed toe were hallmarks of mostly Chinese crime gangs linked to Philippine offshore gaming operators. The victim had no links to either POGOs or casinos.

The Chinese government has warned of the criminal activities engendered by POGOs. It also noted that reports of POGO-linked Chinese crime gangs engaged in kidnapping, torture and murder targeting Chinese from the mainland as well as Tsinoys are turning away from the Philippines tourists from China.

In the 1990s, the Philippines was rocked by a kidnapping spree targeting mainly the Chinese-Filipino community. A take-no-prisoners crackdown broke up the kidnapping gangs and largely put an end to the scourge. In subsequent years, the problem has cropped up sporadically. There was a resurgence during the COVID lockdowns, beginning in April 2021, targeting online cockfighting enthusiasts.

With 34 sabungeros still unaccounted for and nearly all the cases unsolved, the country cannot afford to have foreign crime gangs turning the Philippines into their playground. This threat must be confronted decisively before it gets out of hand.