Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella is again reminding Cebuanos that making prank calls could land the caller in jail.
Labella issued the reminder after the Department of Education (DepEd) received an anonymous call on Monday, January 27, 2020, to inform education officials that a bomb was planted in one of the public schools in the city.
Personnel of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) searched the different public schools but failed to located the said bomb.
Still, classes were ordered suspended in public schools in Barangays Mambaling, Basak Pardo, Tisa and Labangon to ensure the safety of their pupils.
The children were sent home while CCPO bomb squad personnel swept their respective schools.
Labella said he kept the information on the prank call confidential to prevent from causing panic.
“We already thought yesterday (that) it must have been a prank call, but we treated it as if it were real. We deployed the police to all public schools to check,” Labella said during his press conference on Tuesday, Jan. 28.
He said that while the police failed to locate any bomb, they are now working to locate and identify the anonymous caller so that appropriate charges may be filed against him/her for threatening the city’s security.
“I want to find out who the prank caller is. He or she needs to be brought to justice,” Labella said.
Making prank calls especially on government hotlines will already be considered a criminal offense as soon as Senate Bill 400 or the “Anti-Prank Callers Act of 2019” authored by Senator Bong Go is passed into law.
The bill considers making prank call “a mischievous or malicious telephone call made to trick or fool someone with the intention to annoy, abuse, threaten, harass, or solicit any comment, request, suggestion or sound which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent, or a call intending to make false requests or false alarm of an emergency, knowing the report or information or alarm to be false.” / dcb