Judge denies bail to 200 kg shabu suspect

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) won a major battle in a 200-kilo drug case it filed against a Chinese-Filipino woman after a Pasay City court ruled that it had sufficient evidence to deny the latter’s motion for bail.

In a four-page decision, Judge Cesar Ylagan of Pasay City Regional Trial Court Branch 231, ruled that strong evidence exists against the accused and that this "has not been diminished but has in fact been reinforced by the evidence so far adduced by the prosecution. In conclusion, the court finds no factual reason nor legal justification to grant the petition for bail."

Accused in the case is Sandra Lim, the alleged owner of Somerset Condominium’s Unit 706 in Pasay City where 200 kilos of shabu were seized in December last year along with high-powered firearms, grenades and bullet-proof vests.

"The owners of the drugs appear ready to fight a war with what we recovered," said lawyer Reynaldo Esmeralda, formerly of the NBI Special Task Force, which effected the seizure of the shabu. Esmeralda, currently the assistant regional director of the NBI office in Tacloban, Leyte, is one of the prosecution witnesses in the case.

In requesting for bail, claiming that the evidence against her is weak, Lim said the owner of the condominium unit is Edgardo Escorial, that she was never spotted coming in or out of the unit at the time of the NBI’s surveillance of the room, and that the seizure was illegal.

But when presented in court, Escorial said he was merely asked to sign a document which he thought to be for the transfer of a vacant lot but was actually for the condominium unit, by the brother of his former employer.

The condominium administrator, on the other hand, said that it was Lim who had been paying the monthly bills of the condominium unit that had long been padlocked from the outside when the NBI forcibly entered it. – Jose Aravilla