PETALING JAYA: One Malaysian and three Chinese tourists were kidnapped by rogue police officers in the Philippine capital region over the weekend for a ransom of 2.5 million pesos (about RM201,787).
The incident began when two armed police officers on motorcycles stopped a luxury car carrying three Chinese nationals and one Malaysian.
The tourists were then handcuffed and forcibly taken into a van by them, the South China Morning Post reported.
However, two of the Chinese victims managed to escape and alerted the authorities, police said.
The remaining victims were beaten but later released overnight following the ransom payment, Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos said.
He said that details from the freed tourists along with security camera footage resulted in the arrest of the four police officers, one of whom was a police major.
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“I was shocked that policemen were the ones involved,” Abalos said in a news conference, where the four police were presented in handcuffs and orange detainee shirts.
“This incident is a serious breach of public trust and core values of the police force.”
Authorities are now searching for at least 10 additional suspects who are not police officers but are believed to have participated in the kidnapping.
Criminal complaints for kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery have been filed against the suspects.
Former Phillipines president Rodrigo Duterte had characterised many of the more than 230,000 national police officers as “rotten to the core,“ despite directing them to carry out his anti-drug campaign, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of predominantly poor suspects.
The International Criminal Court is investigating these killings as potential crimes against humanity.
Duterte and his national police chiefs have denied authorising extrajudicial killings, despite Duterte’s public threats against drug suspects during his presidency, which ended in 2022.
