THE Bureau of Immigration arrested three foreign sex offenders in Cebu, and stopped another three from entering the country through the Mactan-Cebu International Airport last November.
The bureau announced that it had arrested last Monday, Nov. 27, 2023, two foreign pedophiles wanted by authorities in their countries for molesting children.
American John Tomas Minor, 42, was arrested in a condominium unit at the Cebu Business Park in Cebu City, Bureau of Immigration (BI) Commissioner Norman Tansingco revealed in a statement.
British national Derek Gordon Heggie, 40, was nabbed at a residential unit in Barangay Guadalupe, Bogo City in northern Cebu.
After operatives from the BI’s fugitive search unit in Cebu province made the arrests, the two aliens were detained at the bureau’s Mandaue City office before their transfer to the BI warden facility in Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City.
“They will be deported after our board of commissioners issues the orders for their summary deportation, after which they will be included in our immigration blacklist to prevent them from reentering the country,” Tansingco said. “We should not allow these wanted sex offenders to use the Philippines as a sanctuary to elude arrest and evade prosecution for crimes they committed in their homelands.”
According to US authorities, an arrest warrant was issued for Minor in May by a court in Spokane, Washington, where he had been charged with child rape and molestation.
Heggie, on the other hand, was convicted of sexual assault on Aug. 10, 2005, and committed other sex crimes, including raping a domestic partner in 2018 and an ex-partner in 2013, according to the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, which added that he was also alleged to have had sexual relations with a minor.
Octogenarian
A week earlier, the BI said, it also arrested an Australian octogenarian facing charges of sexual abuse in his home country.
Tansingco said David John Buckley, 81, was arrested last Nov. 21 in Bantayan Island in northern Cebu.
He was also to be deported and placed in the country’s blacklist.
According to the bureau, which described him as “a notorious pedophile,” the federal police in Queensland, Australia had issued two arrest warrants against Buckley amid charges of rape and indecent treatment of children filed against him in Papua New Guinea in 2021 for the sexual abuse of the victims in the 1990s.
Buckley was also said to have committed sex-related offenses in various parts of Queensland, aside from 26 child and sexual abuse offenses from 1988 to 2004.
3 Americans
Days before that, the BI intercepted three convicted American pedophiles who had tried to enter the country via the Mactan-Cebu airport after they arrived on Korean Air flights from Incheon, Seoul.
Neil Eugene Graves, 47, was intercepted on Nov. 18, while Stuart Chase Dingman, 60, was stopped on Nov. 19. Both were registered sex offenders as they had been convicted of sexual offenses.
Tansingco said the law prohibits the entry of aliens convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude.
According to the BI, a circuit court in Kent, Michigan had convicted Graves in 2011 of criminal sexual conduct for molesting a victim between 13 to 15 years of age.
Dingman, on the other hand, was convicted in 1996 and in 1992 for assault and battery of a child in Massachusetts.
Both Americans were put on a flight back to Incheon.
Previously denied
In the case of the third American, William Calloway Shaw, 68, who was intercepted on Nov. 13, he was already on the BI’s blacklist but attempted to reenter the country.
According to the BI, Shaw had already been denied entry in 2020 based on information from the US embassy that he was a convicted sex offender in the US.
In Washington state in 2007, he had pled guilty to one count of third degree assault and two counts of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes.