Tomas ‘got death threats’ from Jaguar supporters

THE death threats Cebu City Mayor-elect Tomas Osmeña has been receiving since he declared war against illegal drugs has his wife, Acting Cebu City Mayor Margarita “Margot” Osmeña, worried.

But Margot, on her regular news conference yesterday, said it doesn’t mean her husband should slow down in his campaign against the drug menace.

“As his wife, of course, that bothers me. But, again he just has to take precautions. And it’s part of what he is doing. You can’t make everybody happy,” she said.

Some residents of Barangay Duljo-Fatima said they regretted voting for Tomas in the last mayoral election after their benefactor and suspected drug kingpin Jefrey “Jaguar” Diaz was killed along with a cohort in a shootout with police in Las Piñas last Friday night.

Impact

In his post on Facebook, Tomas said some of Diaz’s supporters have been threatening him since then.

“There are now a significant number of Jaguar sympathizers on my page (most of them have plain black profile pictures) who are sending me threats. Most are from Duljo. They are very angry. Intelligence is also picking up chatter from the underground talking (about) retribution,” he said in his post.

“Do you know what that means? That means what I’ve done has made a real impact. I ran and won on a platform of solving the drug problem. I took this job knowing the risks, and I’m going to do my job. Think you can scare me into stopping? Think again. I do not make my decisions based on fear,” he said.

Margot said that as of yesterday, her husband’s security arrangement remained the same, but these recent developments call for tighter security for both of them.

Meanwhile, Supt. Rex Derilo of the Regional Intelligence Division warned their detractors that once they have enough evidence against some law enforcers, government employees and even police inside their ranks who were linked to Diaz, they will disclose their names.

Up for verification

“The hell that we do, the hell that we don’t. To those law enforcement agencies that are implicated with Jaguar, you watch out,” he said.

He said that his unit had been hunting down Diaz for quite some time.

“We already have the list and we know them, but these are still information reports and although validated, we cannot easily disclose it because most of them are not substantiated with evidence,” Derilo said.

It will be unfair to them as they may be investigated and end up losing their job, he said.

Derilo said Diaz’s arrest was not the focus of their operation in Las Piñas last Friday night.

He said they were there to serve an arrest warrant against another drug suspect, Alvaro “Barok” Alvaro, an alleged big-time drug lord in Cebu Province.

All law enforcement agencies in Region 7 had been looking for Diaz in the last eight years, but not for Alvaro and his men, he said.

rDerilo said Alvaro was a close associate of Diaz and his team has been following the former’s tracks to help reveal his wide-scale illegal drugs operation.

Meanwhile, Derilo said Diaz’s surrender would not have stood in court because he had no pending arrest warrant.

The slain suspect’s lawyers were reportedly processing his visa for an undisclosed country that would indicate that he was leaving the Philippines.

“It was plain publicity so that he could feel better about his crimes, but you cannot just get away with it because it a crime,” Derilo said in Cebuano, referring to Diaz’s media interview.