ANGELES CITY – Policemen are hunting down a kidnap-for-ransom suspect who carted off a sleeping three-year-old girl from her home at dawn last Monday in Barangay Lourdes Northwest here.
The girl was released at night of the same day after bargaining between her parents and the suspects, reducing the ransom demand from P400,000 to merely P30,000.
In a report, Superintendent Roger Tomen from the Angeles City Police Office, said Noel Fernandez and his wife Grace reported to the police their missing daughter Gliecel at about 5:50 a.m. Monday.
The parents said that the day before, they left their daughter at home with her brother Noel, 6, so that they could play at Casino Filipino in Barangay Balibago here. The kids were left in the custody of Noel’s brother Noriel.
The couple said they saw their two kids asleep in their bed when they went home at 4 a.m. Monday but they again left to go to the local market to attend to their chicken business.
The police said at the market, the couple received a text message from a cell phone with number 09158025346 saying in Kapampangan that their daughter was being held and warning of retaliation if the case was reported to the police.
Another text from the suspect demanded P400,000 ransom to be paid at 10 p.m.
“Police station 2 commander Chief Inspector Onnil de la Pena coordinated with the PACER in Camp Crame for the disposition of the case,” Tomen said in the report.
By 8 p.m. The suspect was persuaded by the parents, who were now assisted by PACER agents, to reduce the ransom to only P30,000. The suspect’s aunt Veronica Maclang volunteered to deliver the cash at a designated site along Ventura St. in Barangay Ninoy Aquino at about midnight.
Tomen said the suspect was able to flee with the cash after Maclang failed to immediately send alert signal to police agents who positioned themselves in a nearby block.
The suspect initially misled the parents by saying the kidnapped child as abandoned in Barangay Mining, but later sent information that the victim was in Barangay Pandan where she was found shaken but unharmed.
Tomen said probers have a clue on the identity of the suspect, but he declined to give details.
