BY HERBERT VEGO
ILOILO City – An Australia-based cousin of two brothers arrested in Barangay Canas, San Dionisio, Iloilo for possession of illegal drugs called up Panay News yesterday to question the legality of the police’s buy-bust operation at the suspects’ house Sunday evening.
Denmark Suede, a nurse in Sydney, Australia, had read in yesterday’s online edition of Panay News that his cousins, brothers Jose Vic Baco, 32, and Lawrence Baco, 36, were jailed at the San Dionisio police station following their arrest, allegedly because they were the sources of illegal drugs not only in San Dionsio town but in neighboring towns as well.
According to Insp. Nerio Alanan, San Dionisio police chief, they had recovered from the Baco brothers 17 sachets of methamphetamine hydrochloride (shabu), a homemade shotgun and drug paraphernalia used in sniffing shabu.
Yesterday’s news report quoted Alanan as having said, “They are high-value targets we have been hunting since last year.”
Suede, however, begged to disagree. Based on telephone calls and text messages reaching him in Australia, he said, “The police raided the house of my cousins illegally without a warrant of arrest, without a search warrant and without prior coordination with the barangay captain.”
Suede, son of the late DyFM Bombo Radyo-Iloilo broadcaster Eddie Suede, alleged that the supposedly confiscated gun and shabu could have been planted to make up for the police’s failure to arrest the true target of their operation, who had left the barangay when they arrived.
Suede said the family had already sought the services of a lawyer./PN
