6 Manila cops tagged in P100,000 extortion try

They supposedly just wanted a “massage,” but six members of the Manila Police District (MPD) are now facing administrative and criminal charges for alleged extortion.

The officers—all under the MPD’s Special Operations Unit (SOU)—asked seven massage therapists from Sta. Mesa to see them at the district headquarters.

But when the three male and four female therapists arrived, they were detained on charges of “human trafficking” and asked to cough up P100,000 in cash for their release, according to the complaint reaching the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO).

Chief Supt. Guillermo Eleazar, the NCRPO chief, ordered the officers relieved of their posts on Thursday.
Two of them have been arrested at press time, namely PO1 MJ Cerilla and PO1 Erdie Bautista. The others—PO3 Michael Chavez, PO3 Dindo Encina, PO1 Arcadio Orbis and PO1 Martinico Mario—remained at large.

The SOU head, Chief Insp. Joey de Ocampo, was also relieved based on command responsibility.

Eleazar said that before they were illegally detained, the therapists were contacted by the officers on Wednesday night.

Hours later, the wife of one of the masseurs got a call from one of the policemen asking her to produce P100,000 for her husband’s release.

The wife, who was able to haggle and reduce the extortion money to P50,000, then alerted the Counter-Intelligence Task Force (CITF) of the Philippine National Police, which launched an entrapment operation against the MPD officers.

The seven therapists were still detained at the MPD headquarters on UN Avenue when the CITF team arrived, yet their names were nowhere to be found in the blotter, Eleazar noted.