Pawnshop loses P860K to acetylene gang

ROXAS CITY ,Philippines  — Acetylene Gang men have struck again last Sunday morning when they got into the Palawan Pawnshop, along Plaridel Street in this city, and ran off with P860,000 cash.

The City Police confirmed the burglary, which the thieves carried out by crawling through the ceiling from the adjacent building into the pawnshop where they forced open the mini-vault using acetylene torch and took the cash.

The incident was only discovered by the pawnshop’s daytime security guard and one of the employees, Gladys Pioquid. Initial investigation pointed to at least three suspects.

Chief Supt. Cipriano Querol, Police Regional Office-6 director, said the burglars rented a room, which was a gun store before, next to the pawnshop about a month ago. “They apparently did their surveillance (of the pawnshop) and when the opportune time came, they did the break in,” he said.

Witnesses said one of the suspects spoke the Kinaray-a dialect and could have been from Antique province.

Taken from their rented room were an oxygen tank, acetylene torch, and flashlight. “So, we presumed that they could either drilled a hole in the ceiling to make their way (into the pawnshop) or used the drainage system,” Querol said.

For now, Querol said the police could not yet point at any group that could be responsible. “Although, there were a number of identified suspects involved in acetylene robbery, we could not say that they were the ones responsible, just because they used the same modus operandi,” he said.

“Any group could do it,” said Querol who was optimistic that they could zero in on the suspects once they will study the footages from the pawnshop’s closed circuit television (CCTV).

Investigators have also considered the possibility that the suspects have an accomplice from the store. The stolen cash was only placed on a portable vault instead of the pawnshop’s main vault.

The burglary was the biggest that happened in this city during the last quarter. Earlier, robbers riding-in-tandem took about P1 million cash from a trader in the area.

In 2004, Acetylene Gang made a name after striking banks in Negros Occidental and in Passi City. In Iloilo City, they etched a mark after a failed bank break-in and a successful looting of Exquisite Pawnshop in La Paz of that city with some P5 million worth of jewelries.

In February 2005, Peter Camed, alias Peter Sumadka, a suspected leader of the notorious Acetylene Gang that police identified to have operated all over the country, was recaptured. On October 2006, however, unidentified suspects “ransacked” the Makato Rural Bank owned by the city mayor, using acetylene torch in destroying the vault, and fled with P336,000 cash.

Last February 1, 2011, members of Acetylene Gang also robbed the pawnshop owned by Rosalie Treñas, wife of the Iloilo congressman Jerry, in Jaro, Iloilo City. The suspects ran off with assorted pieces of jewelry worth P400,000 and P23,000 cash.

Before that, suspected members of the gang were arrested after they looted a department store in San Jose, Antique.