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BY RUBY SILUBRICO
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Sunday, June 18, 2017
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ILOILO City – A self-confessed illegal drug pusher tagged two policemen to drug trafficking.
Now Police Officer 1 Napoleon Forbes and Police Officer 2 Gary Cordero are under investigation.
The 35-year-old Joemar Dionero of Barangay Calaparan, Arevalo district claimed the two officers ordered him to sell drugs.
Dionero disclosed the alleged participation of the two officers in the drug trade to a radio station on Friday night. He said he feared getting summarily killed.
Dionero is currently in the custody of the Iloilo City Police Office (ICPO).
Senior Superintendent Christopher Tambungan, Police Regional Office 6 (PRO-6) deputy director for operations, ordered Senior Superintendent Remus Zacharias Canieso, ICPO director, yesterday to investigate Forbes and Cordero.
Forbes is an intelligence officer for the Arevalo police station, while Cordero is under the PRO-6 Regional Special Training Unit.
This “serious accusation” could “ruin the PNP (Philippine National Police) organization,” according to Tambungan.
“We have to know the truth,” said the PRO-6’s overall chairman on illegal drug-related matters. “And we have to give the two policemen a chance to air their side.”
Dionero claimed that he has been selling prohibited drugs since 2015 after he was released from jail — he was detained for theft — with the help of Cordero and Forbes.
His last transaction was on Thursday, June 15, he said.
Panay News reached Forbes through the phone but the police officer refused to comment.
The paper was still trying to reach Cordero for comment as of press time.
Dionero was not in the Arevalo police’s list of suspected drug dealers and users, the station chief Senior Inspector Jose Val Ladublan said.
But Dionero was known to the district police as a suspected thief and robber. He also once figured in a homicide, said Ladublan.
Many police officers across the country have been tagged to the drug trade since Rodrigo Duterte started a relentless campaign against drugs after getting elected president in May 2016.
Duterte threatened to “kill” police officers engaged in the drug trade.
“’Pag nandiyan ka pa sa droga, ipapapatay kita,” he said before supporters in a thanksgiving party in Davao City last June. “Don’t take this as a joke. Hindi ako nagpapatawa. Putangina, papatayin talaga kita.”
Last August he also named active and retired police officers as “drug protectors.”
They included, among others, retired Senior Superintendent Gil Lebin, former Iloilo provincial police director; Superintendent Ipil Dueñas, former Iloilo City Police Office intelligence officer; Senior Superintendent Ricardo De La Paz of the Negros Island Region Police Office; retired Chief Superintendent Marietto Valerio; Chief Superintendent Bernardo Diaz, former director of the Police Regional Office 6; and Senior Superintendent Khasmir Disomangcop, former Iloilo City police director.
That was also the time the President described Iloilo as “most shabu-lized” in the Philippines./PN
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