CCPO gets list of GCTA-freed convicts; starts ‘home address visit’

Police Lieutenant Colonel Leoncio Baliguat Jr., Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) deputy director for operation

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) has received the initial list of convicts from Cebu City who were released under the good conduct time allowance (GCTA) law and has started to visit the home addresses provided on the list.

Police Lieutenant Colonel Leoncio Baliguat Jr., deputy city director for operation of CCPO, told reporters this afternoon, September 16, that they received the list last week ,which prompted them to immediately conduct a monitoring operation to verify if the convicts still live in the areas listed as their home addresses in the city.

Balinguat, however, declined to say how many persons were on the list, saying they would leave it to the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) to divulge the details.

“For now mao to amoa gi himo sa katong naa didto nga mga addresses we tried to locate nga naa pa ba sila diha ron,” said Baliguat.

(For now, we could only try to locate if they are still in the addresses listed beside their names.)

With just three days left before the deadline set by President Rodirgo Duterte for the GCTA-freed convicts to voluntarily surrender, Baliguat said they did not go beyond intelligence monitoring as these convicts still have until September 19, 2019 to report to their nearest police station.

However, Baliguat was worried that some of the convicts in the list may no longer be living in the addresses that they have provided.

He said it will be a bigger problem after the deadline if ever all the convicts will not surrender as they will then set a man-hunt operation, which would mean it will take a longer time to arrest them since the police will now have to trace the possible places of residence of these individuals.

“Tungod sa stigma ang uban ana di na mo balik dirig puyo, so, most likely, basig ni transfer na na silag other province,” said Baliguat.

(Because of the stigma, some of these individuals might no longer return to reside here, so, most likely, they would have transferred to other provinces)

Baliguat said that right now, they will just have to continue with their monitoring until the September 19 deadline to make sure it easier to execute immediate arrest on the convicts who did not surrender./elb