Hundreds of police officers backed by riot squads yesterday raided a vast religious compound in a southern Philippine city in search of a local preacher accused of sexual abuse and human trafficking, police officials said.
A supporter of the group, called Kingdom of Jesus Christ, reportedly died due to a heart attack during the massive police raid that started at dawn in the group’s compound in Davao City, livestreamed online by a local TV network owned by the group, police said, adding that the death was not related to the police operations.
Officers brought equipment that could detect people behind cement walls, but by midafternoon, they found no sign of Apollo Quiboloy in the compound — about 30 hectares that includes a cathedral, a school, a living area, a hangar and a taxiway leading to Davao International Airport.
Photo: AP
Quiboloy and his lawyer have denied the criminal allegations against him and his religious group, saying these were fabricated by critics and former members, who were removed from the religious group after committing irregularities.
Quiboloy’s followers, many filming the police raid with their cellphones, yelled at the police, questioning the legality of the raid and pronouncing the innocence of Quiboloy, who was a close supporter and spiritual adviser of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte had criticized previous attempts by large numbers of police to arrest Quiboloy as overkill.
Quiboloy claims to be the appointed son of God. In 2019, he claimed he stopped a major earthquake from hitting the southern Philippines.
Philippine Police Brigadier General Nicolas Torre III, who led the raid, said that officers wanted to serve warrants for the arrest of Quiboloy for various criminal cases, including child abuse and human trafficking.
He said the large deployment was needed as the compound had more than 40 buildings and structures to be searched, where large numbers of Quiboloy’s followers heckled and opposed the raid noisily.
“We won’t leave here until we get him,” Torre told reporters as sirens blared in the background. “We have no-bail warrants for Quiboloy and four others for very grave crimes, including human trafficking, child abuse and other cases.”
In 2021, US federal prosecutors announced the indictment of Quiboloy for allegedly having sex with women and underage girls who faced threats of abuse and “eternal damnation” unless they catered to the self-proclaimed “son of God.”
Quiboloy and two of his top administrators were among nine people named in a superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury and unsealed in November 2021.
The superseding indictment contained a raft of charges, including conspiracy, sex trafficking of children, sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, marriage fraud, money laundering, cash smuggling and visa fraud.
Quiboloy’s group said then that he was ready to face the charges in court, but he went into hiding after a Philippine court ordered his arrest and several others for child and sexual abuse.
The Philippine Senate has separately ordered Quiboloy’s arrest for refusing to appear in committee hearings that was looking into criminal allegations against him.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has urged Quiboloy to surrender and assured him of fair treatment by authorities.
When he was mayor of Davao and later as president, Duterte appeared in Quiboloy’s news program to promote his police-enforced drug crackdowns, which left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead.
Duterte and his police officials have denied authorizing extrajudicial killings of drug suspects, but he openly threatened drug dealers with death when he was in office.
The International Criminal Court has been investigating the widespread killings under Duterte’s campaign against illegal drugs as a possible crime against humanity.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS