LA CASTELLANA Mayor Rhumyla Nicor-Mangilimutan said her family will pursue the case against Chief Inspector Alan Reloj, head of Moises Padilla Municipal Police Station, who tagged her brother in the illegal drug trade.
Mangilimutan said Thursday, October 12, that criminal and administrative charges are being readied against Reloj as his claims against her younger brother, Councilor Alberto Nicor III, were not true.
The mayor said they recently appeared before the Intelligence and Investigation Section of Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) and the latter cleared his brother.
She also asked the PDEA to reinvestigate the drug campaign in Negros Occidental.
“Investigate the status because the problem is, we couldn’t understand (their drug campaign),” the mayor said.
Nicor was tagged by the most wanted man in the neighboring Moises Padilla town who was arrested in a drug buy-bust operation in San Enrique town last month.
Mangilimutan welcomed President Rodrigo Duterte’s move designating again the PDEA as the sole agency in charge of the administration’s war on drugs.
“It is much better because we have one agency to blame if the operation is unsuccessful,” the mayor said.
She said that some of the drug cases were dismissed in courts due to the technicality in implementing the drug campaign by the local police and other agencies.
“If it’s delegated to the local police, they can sometimes be handled by the mayors. If it’s the agency, they have no connection to the local chief executives,” the mayor.
For a national agency, there’s always coordination with the local government once they have drug operations in their locality, she said, adding that there are no biases with them on the drug war.
She pointed out that if the drug campaign is being delegated to all law enforcement agencies, the local chief executive won’t have any idea who is operating in their locality and how the operation was executed.