Police officers arrested in Philippines over alleged kidnapping of tourists

Four police officers in the Philippine capital region have been arrested for kidnapping four foreign tourists for ransom, officials said.

Two of the officers on board motorcycles are alleged to have flagged down a luxury car carrying three Chinese and a Malaysian citizen over the weekend, while their armed civilian cohorts handcuffed and dragged the four tourists into a van.

Two of the Chinese managed to escape and notified authorities, police said.

The remaining captives were beaten by the kidnappers but freed overnight after payment of a 2.5 million peso (£33,700) ransom, interior secretary Benhur Abalos said.

Information provided by the freed tourists and images from security cameras led to the arrest of the four officers, including a police major, he said.

“I was shocked that policemen were the ones involved,” Mr Abalos said in a news conference, where the four police were presented in handcuffs and orange detainee shirts. “This incident is a serious breach of public trust and core values of the police force.”

Police said they are looking for at least 10 other suspects who were not police but were implicated in the kidnapping.

Officers said they filed criminal complaints for kidnapping, carjacking and robbery against the suspects.

Former president Rodrigo Duterte had described many members of the national police, numbering more than 230,000 nationwide, as “rotten to the core”, although he ordered them to enforce his anti-drugs crackdown that led to the killings of thousands of mostly poor suspects.

The International Criminal Court has been investigating the large-scale killings as a possible crime against humanity.

Mr Duterte and the national police chiefs who served under him had denied authorising extrajudicial killings although the former president had publicly threatened drug suspects with death during his presidency, which ended in 2022.