Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra on Sunday said the National Bureau of Investigation is expected to complete this month its probe into the Philippine National Police-Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency shootout as the NBI is just finishing the tedious evidence-gathering process involving the examination of several thousands of printed content extracted from the mobile phones of the involved operatives.
Guevarra expressed optimism that the NBI would be able to complete its investigation on the PNP-PDEA shootout, that left five people dead, by the end of August.
“The NBI hopes to submit its final report to the DOJ by the end of this month,” Guevarra said, in a text message to reporters.
The NBI findings will be forthcoming six months after the February 24 shooting incident took place outside the Ever Gotesco Mall in Commonwealth, Quezon City.
Guevarra admitted that it is taking the NBI a longer time to finish its report because they were being very thorough with their investigation. They are just waiting for the results of a forensic report that would serve as the final piece in their investigation, he said.
“The NBI has almost completed its investigation and is waiting for just one remaining critical report— the result of digital forensic examination of the mobile phones of the operatives involved in the incident,” he said.
“A lot of material evidence is expected to be mined from these devices,” he added.
According to Guevarra, aside from the tedious process of obtaining cyber warrants, “our forensic investigators have had to examine meticulously an average of 22,000 pages of text messages, call logs, videos, and pictures per mobile phone.”
The shootout between operatives of the PNP Quezon City Police District (QCPD) and the PDEA resulted in five casualties, including two PNP personnel and one PDEA agent. There were also reports of others injured.
Both former PNP chief General Debold Sinas and PDEA Director General Wilkins Villanueva then claimed that their men were deployed to conduct legitimate buy-bust operations where undercover officers posed as drug buyers to capture the narcotics dealers.
But there were those who expressed the possibility that the two government law enforcement agencies might have been played by drug syndicates, and that there might have been lapses in the vetting of information before they conducted their operations.