13 drug suspects bolt PDEA jail in Camp Olivas; hunt on

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – Thirteen drug suspects escaped from the jail of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency inside the Central Luzon police headquarters in Camp Olivas here at 1 a.m. on Sunday (Feb. 26).

The fugitives’ identities were not made public at press time.

They used a chainsaw to cut open the steel bars of their cell, but how they obtained the tool and got past the gates of Camp Olivas are still being investigated, said Juvenal Azurin, PDEA Central Luzon director.

Most of the escaped inmates are from Bulacan. Several of them have been in jail for five months, Azurin said.

“We all consider them high value targets because the volume of illegal drugs seized from [the escaped suspects] are big,” Azurin added.

He said the police manhunt has spread to Metro Manila and other provinces in Central Luzon.

The Philippines has frequently suffered mass escapes from prisons which are usually overcrowded, poorly maintained and inadequately guarded.

In the country’s biggest jailbreak, more than 150 inmates escaped a prison in the southern Philippines in January after about a hundred gunmen stormed the facility.

In August 2016 members of a Muslim extremist group that pledges allegiance to the Islamic State group stormed a jail in the south and broke out 23 inmates. With a report from AFP/rga/ac