BI keeps RP from becoming a haven for terrorists

The Philippines is not a safe haven for terrorists as almost every suspected terrorist that managed to sneak into the country has been arrested or deported promptly.

Records at the Bureau of Immigration reveal that from January to July this year, immigration agents arrested 337 aliens for violating Philippine immigration laws, about 20 of whom were fugitives from justice in their homelands.

Of the 337 arrested, 148 were deported to their countries of origin while the rest are the subject of deportation hearings by the bureau’s board of commissioners. The deported aliens have been blacklisted and banned from re-entering the country.

Among the high-profile fugitives who were arrested and subsequently deported were Alfred Sirven, who had been on the most wanted list in France for defrauding a petroleum giant of billions of dollars, and Brian James Curtis, a convicted heroin trafficker who was New Zealand’s most wanted fugitive after he bolted a maximum security prison down there.

And weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, joint operatives of the bureau and the Philippine National Police arrested a Vietnamese-American, a Swiss, and a Japanese who are members of an Asian terrorist group suspected of plotting against the Vietnamese government.

Commissioner Andrea Domingo said just a day after the attacks in the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the US, her agents at the NAIA caught an Iranian terrorist who had sneaked into the country with a fake Philippine passport together with his Filipina fiancee.

She said the same Iranian was arrested by the police last year when they found sealed maps of the US Embassy and Cagayan de Oro City in his possession. The Cagayan de Oro maps showed 12 markings, three of which eventually got bombed late last year.

Domingo said the bureau has also intensified its campaign against "human smuggling," a syndicated way to bring in criminals. From January to July, the bureau has denied entry to 911 aliens found to have been improperly documented. Some 160 Japanese suspected of being Yakuza members were among those "excluded" or denied entry.

According to Domingo, the bureau’s anti-terrorist campaign will definitely achieve more when its multi-million computerization project gets completed next year.

The project, which involves setting up a wide area network of database files linking the NAIA and the different immigration field offices all over the country, will speed up information exchange including checking and verifying alien derogatory records.