BECAUSE she trusted a man she had met online, a nursing assistant from Perth, Australia was arrested after allegedly receiving more than P11 million worth of illegal drugs in Cebu City.
Dorotea Ausan Moyes, 62, an Australian citizen who originally hailed from Antique, was caught by a team from the Fuente Police Station after she turned over a bag with more one kilo of shabu to the hotel she was staying at in Barangay Kamputhaw.
“She met a certain Andrew Woods online who she claimed was her future husband. This Woods then gave her plane tickets from Perth to Cebu to Hong Kong, with her final destination as Osaka, Japan where she was supposed to deliver the package,” said Insp. Greg Ybiernas, deputy chief of the Fuente Police Station.
Moyes, in an interview, said she was innocent.
“He told me that he loved me. So I was excited about meeting him. For three months, we were chatting online so I was really shocked by this,” she said.
Ybiernas said that Moyes, no matter how much she persuaded Woods to send her a picture of himself, never gave himself away.
“It’s possible that he was using a fake identity that’s why we are asking our Anti-Cybercrime Group to trace Woods’ calls to Moyes through Messenger,” Ybiernas said.
At 10:30 a.m. last Saturday, the Fuente Police Station received a call from the security team of Cebu Parklane Hotel regarding a woman who wanted assistance because of what was inside her bag.
According to the initial investigation, Moyes asked for help from the hotel’s security guards at 8 a.m. In her statement, she said she had no idea that aside from a laptop, there was also shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) inside the bag that had been given to her.
The shabu was wrapped in tape, carbon paper and dust particles, apparently intended to hide the drugs from x-ray scanners.
Handed over
Moyes said that Woods was an Irishman who instructed her to deliver the package to his boss in Japan. She received it from four “foreign-looking” men inside a convenience store and fastfood chain on Gen. Maxilom Ave.
They knew her but she didn’t know them.
Moyes’ flight for Hong Kong, her connecting flight to Japan, was set at noon.
A source from the intelligence community, who requested not to be named, said that the Moyes acted as a drug mule for an international drug syndicate that made Cebu their meeting point.
“They made Cebu their transshipment point so that they could distribute shabu to other countries around the world. But that doesn’t mean that the drugs were sourced directly here,” the source said.
Moyes was arrested for violating Sec. 11 of the RA 9165 which penalizes persons who have mere possession of illegal drugs, Ybiernas said.