MANILA: Philippine police have identified about 60 suspected “private armies” that could use violence to influence national elections next year, an official said yesterday.
Armed followers of politicians have long been a major problem during elections, carrying out crimes like the 2009 massacre of 58 people to protect the interests of powerful clans.
National police spokesman Chief Superintendent Generoso Cerbo said police intelligence had found about 60 suspected “private armed groups” in different parts of the country.
“Once we have completely validated this, all of our units will go after these groups,” he told reporters.
The initiative would be part of national police efforts to safeguard local and legislative elections in May 2013, Cerbo added.
A previous national police study in 2010 found 112 private armed groups all over the archipelago with numbers ranging from a handful of men to hundreds.
Cerbo said police were conducting a new count because some of these groups had already been broken up while others had voluntarily disbanded.
The groups consist of government-supported militiamen, insurgents, rogue police or soldiers or armed thugs who do the bidding of politicians to help them stay in power.
This can include intimidating rival candidates or voters or spoiling the counting of ballots.
In the worst case of violence involving private armies, followers of a powerful clan in 2009 killed 58 people in the southern Philippines to prevent a rival from running against one of the clan members.
Taiwan orders officers to face lie detector
TAIPEI: Taiwan is ordering dozens of military officers serving abroad to return home for lie detector tests to stem a wave of espionage cases shaking the island, the defence minister said yesterday.
More than 50 military attaches and other senior personnel assigned abroad have been called back one after the other since last year to do the polygraph test, Kao Hua-chu told parliament.
“We haven’t come across anything unusual in these tests,” he told legislators. He explained that from now on, the officers will have to do the test once year.
Even officer cadets undergoing training abroad will be required to do the tests, Kao said.
The new measure, which was only made public yesterday, comes after a string of embarrassing cases, where Taiwanese officers were found to spy on behalf of arch enemy China.
Taiwan authorities in January 2011 arrested Major General Lo Hsien-che over claims that he spied for China.
The 52-year-old was head of the army’s telecommunications and electronic information department, according to the defence ministry.
AFP
