Senate Warns Against Sex Gang

Published in Philippine Daily Inquirer

A WHITE slavery ring is behind the rash of abductions of high schools girls in Metro Manila and Tarlac, a Senate committee head said yesterday.

Sen. Robert Barbers, Senate public order and illegal drugs committee chair, warned the public against the sex gang, adding that the seven abduction cases which the police referred to him are already a “cause for alarm because the ages of the victims are almost identical.”

Barbers, a former police investigator, added that similarities in the details noted by the victims, such as the use of chloroform to make them unconscious and the color of the vehicle used by the abductors, tend to show they were grabbed by the same group of people.

Barbers noted that teenaged girls are “easier to sell to customers of prostitution dens and this gives basis to belief that the perpetrators are involved.in prostitution or worse, with drug syndicates.”

Barbers has received seven separate reports of abductions from the police, including two from Mandaluyong, one from Makati and four from Tarlac.

After the INQUIRER reported the case of a student from the Benigno Aquino High School in Makati City who escaped her captors at the corner of Edsa and Shaw Boulevard, parents of other missing girls began trooping to police stations to report.

The same girl, along with two others, testified about her ordeal yesterday during a hearing of Barbers’ committee.

AB, the girl studying in Makati, and MM from the Tarlac State University, both recounted being forced into a waiting black or gray L300 van and being covered on the nose with a chloroform-laced cloth.

Both recalled seeing other girls, either unconscious or crying, inside the vans.

The third girl, MB, was offered a tricycle ride by a woman who claimed she wanted to offer Avon products to her mother.

All three victims luckily escaped their captors.

Chief Supt. Edgar Aglipay, Metro police chief, said the police are now reviewing similar cases reported in the past to see whether the group behind the abductions can be linked to others already noted by authorities.

BY CATHY CARARES-YAMSUAN