The police on Monday denied the alleged selling of prohibited drugs at the Close-Up Forever Summer Concert in Pasay City last month where five concert-goers died after taking banned substances.
At a hearing conducted by the joint House committees on Metro Manila development, on dangerous drugs, and on youth and sports development, Police Senior Supt. Manuel Lucban Jr., representative from National Capital Region Police Office, said the police has agreed with position of Unilever Philippines Inc., manufacturer of Close-Up, that there was no selling of illegal drugs during the event, even as its investigations confirmed the same.
“Based on the information that we got, the victims who died took the fatal substances before they entered the concert grounds. It’s only incidental that they went to the Close Up Forever Summer in the series of selling Ecstacy,” Lucban told reporters.
“There is rampant selling of these drugs because our youth is using the social media [in such transactions]. And so we urge the parents to closely look after their children, especially when they are on social media,” he added
The investigations they conducted showed that the victims could have allegedly taken the dangerous drugs outside the event and that they had been under the influence of prohibited drugs when the concert had started. Lucban added that the Close-Up Forever Summer Concert could be “incidental” to the series of rampant selling of Ecstasy in the country.
Lawyer Adon Gabriel, a Close-Up counsel, maintained there was no selling of the so-called ‘party drugs’ at the concert hall.
Gabriel said they had been “very cooperative with the investigation by the National Bureau of investigation (NBI).”
“There were no incidents of drug abuse during the first three concerts. It’s unfortunate that this incident occurred this year,” Gabriel said.
“We fully cooperated with NBI in their probe,” Gabriel added.
Dr. Romel Papa, chief of the NBI Forensic Investigation Division, revealed they found traces of sex drug ecstasy in some of the victims’ bodies.
“Some of the bodies contained methylenedioxymethamphetamine or ecstasy, methaline homolob, a crystalline substance that is commonly used in forensic work to identify dangerous drugs, and a synthetic cathinone, otherwise known as bath salts,” he said. But he did not clarify who among the specific victims or the five of them had traces of the lethal substances.
“We can only give you the results of the test though we can’t identify who the samples were taken from,” he said.
