EDITORIAL - Gunrunners

Regardless of how a service pistol of the Philippine National Police ended up in the possession of suspected terrorists in Indonesia, it does not speak well of gun regulation in the Philippines. The PNP confirmed yesterday that the 9mm Beretta pistol recovered by Indonesian police in a counterterrorism raid last Aug. 31 was issued to a PNP officer.

Two suspected terrorists and a police officer were killed in what Indonesia said was a shootout in Surakarta, Central Java. The two reportedly belonged to Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid or JAT, which was tagged as a terrorist organization by Washington earlier this year. JAT, organized in 2008 reportedly by Abu Bakar Bashir, has been linked to the establishment of small terror cells in a village in Java. Bashir is seen as the spiritual leader of the terror cell Jemaah Islamiyah, loosely linked to al-Qaeda, which operates in conflict areas in Mindanao.

That link could explain how suspected JAT militants got their hands on a pistol marked as PNP property. It’s not the first time that service firearms of Philippine law enforcement and military units have been obtained by lawless elements. Communist New People’s Army militants have raided government armories many times. Islamic separatists have seized weapons and ammunition from state forces. After the Maguindanao massacre in 2009, a search of the numerous residential compounds of the Ampatuan clan, tagged as the brains in the mass killings, yielded crates of high-powered guns. Several crates bore markings of the Department of National Defense.

Not all the weapons and ammunition were stolen from the state. In several cases in the past, military and police personnel were found to have sold government-issued weapons and ammunition to civilians and even groups classified as enemies of the state.

The case in Indonesia should prompt the PNP and other security agencies to improve monitoring of their weaponry. Government-issued firearms and ammunition must be retrieved from members of these agencies in case of suspension. A detailed inventory of weaponry must be conducted regularly and a central database set up for easy access by relevant units. Such an inventory not only can discourage trafficking in government-issued weapons but also assist law enforcement agencies in tracing criminals. The proliferation of loose firearms in this country is bad enough. The problem gets worse when some of the gunrunners are law enforcers themselves.