Lawyer Antonio Pagatpat, National Bureau of Investigation director in Central Visayas, said the regional office of the NBI has only two agents qualified to handle cases of cybercrimes, or crimes involving the use of the Internet and Internet technology.
At the turnover of new regional directors last Monday, Pagatpat said he had discussed this problem with the chief of the NBI’s computer crime division.
The NBI’s central office, he said, had given assurances that training programs would be conducted for the NBI’s regional agents to equip them with the technological skills needed to handle cybercrimes.
The training program would be part of plans to make Cebu the center of an NBI unit that would exclusively handle cybercrime cases.
Vice Gov. Agnes Magpale said efforts to bring offenders to justice are being made more difficult by the slow prosecution of cybercrime cases.
She cited a case that the provincial government filed in 2011 against parents of seven children who are victims of cyberpornography and who were rescued by NBI agents and members of the Provincial Women’s Commission (PWC), a provincial agency helping women and children get protection against abuses.
The children’s parents are the ones found to be directly involved in cyberpornography, forcing their children to perform sexual acts for viewers in the Internet.
Magpale, who is chair of the PWC, said the case is dragging on because of several technicalities. First, questions on jurisdiction prompted the transfer of the case’s venue from Lapu-Lapu City to Mandaue City.
As a result, Magpale said, the case has been handled by three different judges. The first judge, from Lapu-Lapu, was forced to let go of the case when it was transferred to Mandaue. In Mandaue, the case fell on the lap of a judge, who had to transfer the case to another judge when he was assigned to Cebu City.
Aside from the 2011 case, two other cybercrime cases are languishing in courts in Cebu.
“We’re still waiting. The children have grown up,” said Magpale.
Police have tagged Cebu as among the country’s four cyberpornography hot spots after the province was marked as such on an online map prepared by the Philippine National Police, Department of Social Welfare and Development and the British National Crime Agency’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection unit.
The three other cyberpornography hot spots are Angeles City in Pampanga, Cagayan de Oro City and Metro Manila.
Magpale told Inquirer that while Cebu is one of the hot spots, the province has been ahead in its fight against cybercrime cases.
“We are making a headway in our fight (against cybercrime),” she told reporters.
Magpale said the provincial government has requested the help of the US government to locate pedophiles who may have slipped into Cebu from the United States.
Pagatpat said the NBI is monitoring two new cases of cyberpornography involving children in Cebu.
Pagatpat said he asked NBI offices in Central Visayas to be proactive.