The Senate is ready for a showdown between former police official Benjamin Magalong and the “ninja cops” whom he has accused of recycling drugs seized in anti-narcotics raids, Senator Richard Gordon said Sunday.
READ: Senate to unmask ‘ninja’ cops
Senator Christopher Go, a close aide to the President, said the Chief Executive will make public the names of the ninja cops upon his return from a visit to Russia.
“I have talked to the President. And he plans to read [the list] and make it public when he returns from his Russia trip. He is just validating and he is digging deeper into their involvement,” Go said.
READ: Narco-cops’ list to Rody; Sampaloc drug queen named
He said the President is consolidating the list with reports from different government agencies, including the Philippine Drug Enforcement Administration and the intelligence community.
“He has been asking for all of them to be cross-validated,” he said.
Gordon, chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon and Justice committees, said they intend to summon the police officers named by Magalong, now Baguio City mayor when the Senate probe into the Bureau of Corrections resumes Tuesday.
Gordon said they will immediately summon all those implicated in this illicit drug activity—“the foolish police officers who believe they are beyond the law,” so they will have jurisdiction over them.
He also underscored the importance of having a face-to-face confrontation between Magalong and the so-called ninja cops.
Gordon said President Rodrigo Duterte can announce the list first if he wants to because the police officers are directly under him.
Expressing his belief in the credibility of the Baguio City mayor, Gordon said Magalong has nothing to gain in his expose since he was already retired from the service.
He added that they now have direct evidence against top ranking police officers and said he would reveal their names.
Before Magalong testified, PDEA chief Aaron Aquino had similar testimony about the recycling of illegal drugs, Gordon said.
The Senate earlier authorized the Blue Ribbon and justice committees to make public the information divulged by Magalong, during an executive session last week on policemen allegedly involved in drug recycling.
Metro Manila police chief Major General Guillermo Eleazar on Tuesday linked 16 ninja cops to a drug syndicate allegedly operating in the metropolis.
He said nine of the 16 were already dead, one was in jail, and the others were retired, dismissed or absent without leave.
In an interview on Dobol B sa NewsTV, PNP spokesman Brig. Gen Bernard Banace said they were monitoring 22 so-called ninja cops, whose numbers were down from 87 in the last three years.
Meanwhile, Aquino said the arrest of a PDEA agent for illegal possession of shabu is proof that “crooked enforcers exist, even in PDEA.”
In a statement, he denounced crooked agents and vowed to “pursue them to the full extent of the law.”
“PDEA will continue to support and cooperate with the Philippine National Police in our campaign against illegal drugs and PDEA also vowed to be stricter in the implementation of its internal cleansing to rid the agency of erring employees,” he said.
Laguna police arrested PDEA agent Richard Gaufo, 39, of San Fernando City, Pampanga, and his companion, Joseph Martin Patrick Borjal, 39, on Saturday.
Borjal was the subject of a search warrant when Gaufo was arrested inside the former’s house in Barangay Pacita 1.
Authorities confiscated three guns, bullets, a hand grenade, 10 sachets of suspected shabu and a fake PDEA identification card with Borjal’s name on it.
