Senior Supt Ritchie Posadas, chief Aviation Security Unit (right) says he has pictures of Liming Zhou’s alleged Filipino contacts in Cebu. Zhou was caught with 4.2 kilos of shabu inside her luggage. (CDN PHOTO/FERDINAND EDRALIN)
POLICE are looking for a man and a woman whose photos appear in the mobile phone of the Chinese woman who was caught inside the Mactan Cebu International Airport (MCIA) with drugs inside her luggage.
Senior Supt. Ritchie Posadas, chief of the Aviation Security Unit in Central Visayas (AVSEU-7), said these persons were identified by Liming Zhou as the same persons who were supposed to fetch her from the airport and take her to a hotel 10 minutes away from there.
Posadas said Zhou told them that both of them are Filipinos.
The man, she told the police, was the driver of the vehicle that would fetch her. However, Zhou failed to give the identity of the woman.
Police are checking CCTV footage at the airport to see if the two persons were in the airport premises before, during and after Zhou’s arrest and if there are suspicious-looking persons who fled after learning of her arrest.
They have asked a copy of the July 20 closed-circuit television camera (CCTV) footage when Zhou was arrested.
Zhou, during their investigation on the day of her arrest, did not give the name of her cousin whom she earlier said was the one who asked her to bring the luggage to Cebu.
She only told the police that the name of the Canadian lover of her cousin was “Charles.”
But Posadas said they could not determine if Zhou was telling the truth or if she really had a cousin who asked her to bring the luggage to Cebu.
Posadas said the Anti-Illegal Drug Group (AIDG) based in Camp Crame is also doing a separate investigation, specifically doing a forensic examination of the iPhone of Zhou.
The AIDG wants to extract the contacts and messages to determine who Zhou was in touch with when she travelled to Cebu. The AIDG will give them the result of the forensic examination next week.
This will be used as additional evidence for the charge that Zhou is facing in court.
Zhou was charged with transporting illegal drugs, a violation of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act before the Regional Trial Court (RTC) in Lapu-Lapu City.
Eleven packs of shabu, which weighed 4.2 kilos, were found inside her luggage. The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency in Central Visayas (PDEA-7) said it had an estimated value of P6.2 million.
Zhou revealed that this was her third visit to Cebu since the issuance of her passport last January 2016.