SHABU IN THE BAG: Insp Greg Ybiernas, chief of the Fuente Police Station of the
Cebu City Police Office (CCPO), shows the identification documents of Dorotea Moyes, a Filipino-Australian who was arrested for possession of a kilo of shabu contained in a backpack handed to her by a friend of her future husband that she met online. (CDN PHOTO/LITO TECSON)
Woman who came to Cebu to marry a foreigner is caught with P11M worth of shabu she was to transport to Osaka, Japan
Doretea Moyes, a 61-year-old Filipina from Quezon province who holds an Australian passport, came to Cebu supposedly to meet a man she was going to marry.
But her dream of finding love and a husband in Cebu turned into a nightmare as she is now being held by the police on suspicion that she was a drug mule.
Moyes, who claimed to have worked as a caregiver in Australia, was arrested on Friday after she was found to be holding a backpack that contained a kilo of shabu (crystal meth) worth P11 million.
Moyes was supposed to transport the illegal drugs from Cebu to Osaka, Japan by taking a commercial flight from the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA) bound for Hong Kong, where she was to board a connecting flight to Osaka.
Insp. Greg Ybiernas, deputy chief of the Fuente Police Station, revealed that it was Moyes who actually rang the alarm regarding the suspicious item in the backpack that was handed to her by a ‘friend’ of her boyfriend.
According to Ybiernas, Moyes, who now resides in Quezon province, came to Cebu from Manila to meet her future husband, a foreign national named “Andrew Wood” whom she met online last October.
Moyes also claimed it was Wood who booked her flight online from Manila to Cebu. They agreed to meet in Cebu and for them to go together to Osaka via Hong Kong. Moyes also received on online ticket for Osaka Via Hong Kong, departing from MCIA on Friday.
Moyes arrived in Cebu last Wednesday but was surprised that no Andrew Wood came to meet her. She decided to get herself a room in a hotel but continued to chat online with Wood, who told her on Friday morning to pick up a bag for him at an uptown area in Cebu City.
She said she took a cab to uptown Cebu and met a certain Jude, whom she described as a Latino-looking foreigner and was accompanied by another foreign-looking guy.
She said their meeting only took a few minutes on a street corner and she introduced herself as the future wife of Andrew Wood.
The man also introduced himself as Jude and handed her the bag. But Moyes, sensing something was wrong, asked Jude to open the bag first. She saw a laptop and a box wrapped with masking tape inside the bag.
The man then hastily hailed a cab and sent her on her way back to the hotel where she was staying.
But while she was on the cab, she noticed that the bag was still open. She decided to check out backpack and felt “dust” on the box when she touched the items inside.
Getting suspicious, Moyes, soon after arriving at the hotel, asked the guard for assistance. The guard asked her what was the matter and she instead asked him to accompany her to her room.
Inside her room, she told the guard that there was something suspicious in the bag. Fearing it might be a bomb, the guard immediately alerted the hotel’s management, which, in turn, notified the police.
The responding policemen from the Fuente Police Station, who came with a K9 team, right there suspected there was illicit drugs in the backpack because the two K9 drug-sniffing dogs sat near the bag.
SPO2 Darius Libanan of the Fuente police said that soon after they found the drugs in the backpack, they brought Moyes to the station for verification.
Ybiernas, on the other hand, said that after Moyes narrated to the police the circumstances that brought her to Cebu, they decided to entrap Wood.
They brought Moyes to another hotel on Friday night and let her contact the man online via a video call.
With the police listening, Wood, who is Caucasian, told Moyes he had asked her to carry the backpack supposedly as a favor to his boss named Clark. Another foreigner, introducing himself as Clark, also talked briefly with Moyes.
But Wood suddenly cut off the conversation after Moyes told him that the bag was intercepted by the hotel guards because of the sophisticated gadgets they have.
Ybiernas said they noted that Wood and Clark sounded the same, making them believe that either one of the two men could be the one who was controlling the botched drug drop.
While Moyes could just be a victim, Ybiernas said she was still taken into custody since she was the one found in possession of the drugs and would have to face charges for violation of the anti-drug law, or Republic Act 9165.
Ybiernas said that despite her claim that she did not know about the drugs that were handed to her, she would have to explain it in court and let the court decide her fate.
The charges against Dorotea, who is currently detained at the Fuente Police detention cell, will be filed today, said Ybiernas.
With what happened to Moyes, Ybiernas warned the public especially women to be careful and not immediately believe the identities of persons they only met and chatted with online, especially foreigners.
International drug ring
Meanwhile, a source from the police intelligence community told Cebu Daily News that this was a first arrest of a drug mule in Central Visayas, even as the police and other drug enforcement agencies have long been aware that Cebu has been made a transit point to deliver drugs outside the country.
The source said that the intelligence community was looking into a possible international drug ring having penetrated Central Visayas, with Cebu being part of their areas to dispatch drugs especially since it has an international airport.
The source also believed that the illegal drugs intercepted from Moyes were not manufactured in Cebu but were also brought in from somewhere, most likely from a foreign country, given the numerous international flights coming in and out of the MCIA.
He said that the arrest of Moyes would prompt the narcotics intelligence community to focus on this matter, particularly on the style of shipment that had gone undetected by the airport’s X-ray machines.
Supt. Josefino Ligan, the deputy chief of the police’s Regional Intelligence Division in Central Visayas (RID-7), when reached for comment, told Cebu Daily News that they were now looking into the possibility that an international drug ring is already operating in Cebu.