Sleeper cells?

Before his fall from grace, a police official who was two promotions away from making general, gave this Contrarian a heads-up on a particularly ghastly crime committed in a condo in his area of operation.

As Metro Manila editor of this paper at the time, I had gotten such tips from sources my reporters and I had cultivated through the years by being in the field and refusing to be deskbound.

Especially for the police beat, trust is painstakingly built and many relationships are founded on incidents that deserve stories all their own.

One time, a call came in past midnight about a city jailbreak and once confirmed with another source, the story ended up a “breaking news” item on our online platforms.

Before dawn, all those who had flown the coop had been rounded up (trust me, cops have creative ways of making escapees want to return behind bars on their own). Within minutes of the headcount, the online jailbreak story had been updated to reflect the rearrest.

“There’s a rat among you,” the cops’ commanding officer berated his men. “You sons of bi#t+es, how would TRIBUNE know of the escape and the rearrest within minutes?”

The jailbirds bolted their cell by removing the ceiling’s plywood panel and dismantling the rebar that was so puny that a coping saw would have cut through it. The rebar in such city jails have since been increased in gauge, so lessons must have been learned.

Back to that disturbing condo incident, the photos sent by our police informant showed that a number of Chinese females had turned their rented unit into a slaughterhouse.

Bodies were dismembered and the place was repainted in crimson that forensic laboratory technicians would have found it hard to say, ho-hum, just another day in the office.

“You mean women did this? You sure?” I asked the police official, who answered in the affirmative, saying the CCVT footage showed the entry into the condominium unit of the group sans any male companion.

“Did they test positive for drugs?” I continued.

“That’s yet to be determined, but they sure did down a lot of drinks,” our cop friend answered.

The Chinese females were all workers in a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) company and theirs is just one chilling example of the social ills linked to this industry.

The rise in particularly violent crimes involving Chinese POGO workers makes us wonder about the kind of people that we have welcomed to our shores. Why the particular barbarity? Why the use of torture? And now POGOs have become brazen enough to issue death threats to senators investigating their operations.

Amid China-Philippine tensions in the West Philippine Sea, the sheer number of POGO workers raises national security concerns, with some Filipinos fearing these workers could be used for espionage or, even more worryingly, as a channel to plant sleeper cells — dormant agents waiting for activation while blending in with the population.

Adding fuel to the fire was the recent discovery of a large number of Chinese nationals securing fake birth certificates. This raises a disturbing question: Could these individuals be more than just POGO workers, or are they military types posing as civilians?