Philippine prisons chief on leave after son held in raid

MANILA: The head of the Philippines prisons bureau went on leave hours after his son was arrested during a raid on the house of a suspected illegal drugs trafficker.

Nicanor Faeldon, chief of the Bureau of Corrections, said he had not been in touch with his son for six months and was not aware if his son was involved with illegal drugs.

“What I can assure everybody is that if my son is involved in any way, even if he is just a user, I will resign immediately and hunt him down,” he said in a television interview yesterday. “I will punish him. I will kill that idiot if he’s involved.”

Faeldon’s son, Nicanor Junior, was arrested with three other people in a house in Naga City, 262km southeast of Manila, in a pre-dawn raid on the house of a suspected drug trafficker.

The raid was based on a search warrant issued by a local court against a 47-year-old businessman, who turned out to be the father of Nicanor Junior’s common-law wife, Faeldon said.

Police seized seven sachets of suspected methampetamine hydrocholoride, locally called syabu, the most common illegal drug in the Philippines, during the raid.

Faeldon vowed not to interfere in the investigation, but called on police to immediately determine if his son was involved in illegal drugs.

The former navy captain is a staunch supporter of President Rodrigo Duterte’s aggressive crackdown on illegal drugs, which has seen nearly 5,000 people killed in police operations since 2016.