(Eagle News)–What have you done as Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency chief?
This was the question posed by PDEA chief director-general Aaron Aquino to former PDEA director-general Dionisio Santiago, who had urged him to resign over the issue on ninja cops.
Aquino particularly asked Santiago what he had done on the problem, which he himself revealed during a Senate committee on finance hearing on the PDEA budget.
Aquino had said some law enforcers were also engaged in illegal drugs recycling, a fact confirmed by former Criminal Investigation and Detection Group Chief Benjamin Magalong in a separate Senate hearing on the Good Conduct Time Allowance law.
Magalong revealed a CIDG probe on a drug raid in Pampanga in 2013 found that the 13 policemen behind it presented only 36 kilograms of the 200 kilograms of shabu they seized, prompting speculations they sold the illegal substances to the market.
He said the policemen also presented to the man different from the drug suspect they had arrested.
In 2014, the policemen were ordered dismissed but the order was never implemented.
Aquino later revealed now-Philippine National Police Chief Oscar Albayalde, then the National Capital Region Police Office chief, called him when he was Central Luzon regional police director to ask him to refrain from implementing the dismissal order against the 13 policemen, who he said were his men when he was Pampanga provincial director.
But Albayalde said that while he called Aquino, he never influenced him into doing anything.