THE fingerprints of self-confessed drug lord Franz Sabalones from the records of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in San Fernando, southern Cebu did not match with those of the slain person identified by the police as Sabalones.
Police Regional Office 7 Director Debold Sinas said investigators compared the fingerprints twice, but the results were all negative.
After learning about the findings, Sinas said he could not discount the possibility that Sabalones is still alive and in hiding.
“That might be one of the possible conclusions, but (it is) not definite. We have agreed that any conclusion must be based on scientific findings,” he told reporters on Tuesday, May 21.
The police official further said the person who registered in the Comelec as Sabalones could be a different person.
Sinas believes that only the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) test could confirm Sabalones’s identity.
A team was sent to the house of Sabalones’s parents in San Fernando to get swab samples, but the persons living in the house denied they were his relatives.
Forensics experts can’t proceed with the DNA test without the swab samples from Sabalones’s parents or siblings, according to Sinas.
Authorities have required the persons interested in claiming Sabalones’s body from a funeral parlor in Quezon City to prove his identity by providing his records of fingerprints or through DNA testing.
Sabalones was shot dead by a gunman after he went out of a billiard joint in Barangay South Triangle, Quezon City last April 18.
A few days later a man who claimed to be Sabalones’s cousin tried to claim his body. The police, however, did not allow the funeral parlor to release the body without proof of Sabalones’s identity.
An official of the Quezon City Police District told Superbalita Cebu that the claimant did not return to the funeral parlor, which set its storage fee of the body at P1.8 million.
Sabalones confessed in public that he was one of Cebu’s top drug personalities and that he had worked with slain Cebu top drug lord Jeffrey “Jaguar Diaz” when he surrendered to then police director general Ronald dela Rosa last Aug. 9, 2016. (WBS, AYB of SuperBalita Cebu, KAL)