EDITORIAL - Carelessness and stupidity

What do you know – the guards were in fact sleeping on the job. At least that’s the official finding of the commission that investigated the escape of Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi from Camp Crame last July 14. The nation knew the story all along, courtesy of Director Eduardo Matillano, chief of the Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, who conducted the initial probe shortly after the daring escape from PNP headquarters. Matillano even staged a re-enactment of the escape, sleeping guards and all.

Didn’t at least one of the guards protest that they weren’t sleeping on the job? What happened to the ranking officer of the PNP Intelligence Group who had vowed to tell all about the escape?

If only because the fact-finding panel was headed by the respected former justice secretary Sedfrey Ordoñez, we will give the commission the benefit of the doubt. Faced with all the crooks and liars and people with hidden agenda at Camp Crame, Ordoñez did what he could. We will even suppress laughter over his commendation of the way Director General Hermogenes Ebdane Jr., PNP chief, handled the escape.

Even without collusion, however, the escape can only raise concern about the nation’s capability to fight terrorism and criminality. Going by the report of the Ordoñez commission, the cause of the escape wasn’t corruption or some sinister destabilization plot, but something just as worse: carelessness and stupidity. If one of Southeast Asia’s top terrorists could waltz out of the detention cell of the Intelligence Group at the national police headquarters, with two Abu Sayyaf terrorists in tow, we’re in big trouble.

Then again, there have been other bizarre escapes from PNP headquarters. After Al-Ghozi’s jailbreak, a suspected drug dealer also walked out of Camp Crame, still handcuffed to a folding bed. We wish we could say it couldn’t get worse than that, but it probably will, even with the construction of a new camp detention center. As long as corruption, carelessness, stupidity and intrigue plague the PNP, no detention center can ever be pro-perly secured.

Will the Ordoñez commission’s probe and the sanctions it recommended on several jail guards and police officers improve the detention of suspects at PNP headquarters? Only if the commission truly unearthed the truth and the principal culprits punished.