2 soldiers, cop, 2 cohorts nabbed for peddling government firearms

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Five gunrunners, one of them a policeman and two soldiers, were arrested in the act of selling four assault rifles and five pistols in an entrapment operation Tuesday in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao.

Brig. Gen. Eden Ugale, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, identified the suspects as Eliver Jay Angot Soverano, Gleen Aragones Sangyao, Reynaldo Dechavez Dichosa, Morjan Tumindig and Adams Tumindig, now clamped down in a detention facility of the Datu Odin Sinsuat municipal police.

An initial check in the identities of the suspects indicated that Soverano is a policeman while his two accomplices, Sangyao and Dichosa are both soldiers.

The group was entrapped in Barangay Tamontaka, Datu Odin Sinsuat by personnel of the municipal police led by Lt. Col. Romel  Dela Vega and other units under the Maguindanao provincial police office.

The sting that resulted in the arrest of the five suspects was laid with the help of intelligence agents from the Army’s 6th Infantry Division and local leaders aware of their gunrunning activities.

Seized from the suspects were three 5.56 caliber assault rifles, an M4 Carbine, two .45 caliber pistols, two Glock 9 millimeter pistols and a Zigana PX-9 pistol, all marked “government property,” identical with service firearms of soldiers and police personnel.

Ugale said credit for the arrest of Soverano, Sangyao, Dichosa and the Tumindigs, both residents of Barangay Tamontaka, should go to informants privy to their clandestine selling of government firearms.

Investigators placed at no less than P600,000 the value of the firearms confiscated from them.