For use in the elections?

Cops seize cache of guns for shipment to Mindanao

DUMAGUETE CITY, Philippines – Police operatives intercepted late Wednesday afternoon a cache of firearms, including two high-powered sub-machine guns, at the port of this city, with the shipment intended for unknown recipients in Zamboanga in Mindanao.

The contraband items, stashed in seven bags, included two KG-9 submachine guns without serial numbers, three suppressors (silencers), six long magazines for 9mm caliber ammunition, 17 pieces of Armscor caliber .45 pistols and 37 pieces of magazines.

Senior Supt. Edward Carranza,director of the Negros Oriental Provincial Police Office, said the firearms were believed to have been manufactured in Cebu and could be intended for the elections in 2013 or for other nefarious activities.

Carranza said operatives of the Provincial Intelligence Bureau acted on an intelligence report received earlier that the shipment was en route to Dumaguete on a Ceres bus from Bacolod City in Negros Occidental.

He immediately dispatched intelligence operatives, led by Insp. Ronoel Fungo, who waited for the bus at the city port. At around 4 p.m., as soon as the bus arrived at the port and as passengers disembarked, the policemen immediately conducted a search inside the bus.

But while the contraband items, conspicuously packed in carbon paper to avoid detection by scanning machines were found in separate bags, no one was arrested. The suspected carriers, believed to be one man and three women, as initially reported by the bus driver, apparently fled the area upon sighting the police at the pier.

The police are now investigating further the circumstances and possible identification of persons involved in the shipment of the loose firearms, although the bus operator does not have any liability at all on the contraband items, said Carranza.

Smuggled items can slip unnoticed in commercial vehicles as there is no way to inspect the bags of passengers, he said, adding that Negros Oriental could have been made a trans-shipment point for loose firearms, considering its proximity to Cebu.

Carranza told The Freeman that he reiterated a standing directive for police and even other law enforcement agencies to tighten security in places of egress and ingress, such as airports, sea ports and bus terminals.

While there are no known private armed groups in Negros Oriental, police are now investigating reports of armed criminal groups operating in the province that could be utilized by politicians in the wake of the coming May 2013 polls, he added. (FREEMAN)