Suspects linked to school shooting, online grooming nabbed

Education officials inspected on Saturday the scene of the deadly gun attack. the day before, inside the Banga National High School campus in Banga, South Cotabato.

Philstar.com / John Unson

MANILA, Philippines —  The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has apprehended a person connected to the Sept. 18 school shooting incident in South Cotabato, the third such incident to hit the country’s schools in just three months.

During the Department of Justice (DOJ) budget hearing at the Senate yesterday, NBI Director Melvin Matibag mentioned the developments in the bureau’s probe on the latest school shooting incident at Banga National High School that left three students dead, including the 14-year-old shooter who was allegedly influenced by the nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) network “True Crime Community.”

Matibag said that the NBI is monitoring the deep dark web and investigating NVE cases behind the grooming of the teen school shooters in Tacloban, Zamboanga City and South Cotabato.

“We’re doing our best to monitor it. And incidentally, I may report, yesterday we were able to get hold of one of the individuals somehow related to what happened in South Cotabato,” Matibag said.

The NBI also apprehended a suspected “groomer” in Cebu, Matibag said, without explaining if the person is connected to any of the three school shooting incidents.

“Yesterday also, we made an apprehension of one of suspected groomers from Cebu, and with the help of the Department of Justice National Prosecution Service, we will be processing it today,” Matibag said.

Matibag appealed for the Senate to consider increasing up to P1 billion their proposed P175 million confidential fund allocation in their proposed 2027 budget, so that the NBI can procure equipment to crack down on cybercrime offenses, like digital fraud and nihilistic violence targeting vulnerable youth. 

“There is really an NVE group, and there are lurkers that are copying this. It can be as simple as a student that did not do his homework saying that there will be a shooting,” Matibag said.

“So those are the things that we want to monitor as a team. The NBI, we want to be very active on this one,” he added.

Matibag said that the NBI will submit to Congress their proposals for a possible law to regulate and monitor social media through “age-gating.”

“So it depends on the age, on who will be allowed and how they will be allowed to use… Then coordination with the school, the threat validation and school response, which we did. We were able to apprehend this personality from South Cotabato because of the assistance of the schools involved in what we are doing,” the NBI chief said.