FIRING LINE: Drones and criminal ideas

FIRING LINE: Drones and criminal ideas

By Robert B. Roque Jr. | September 22, 2026

By now, more people reading the news know who Park Wang-yeol is, because of a widely circulated story that he was supposed to escape the Sablayan Prison and Penal Farm in Mindoro by clinging to a $74,000 drone.

The 47-year-old Korean, dubbed the “sugar cane field killer,” was sentenced in 2022 to 60 years for killing three fellow Koreans. He had also bolted from custody twice, in 2017 and 2019. Last March, Manila temporarily handed him to South Korean authorities, at President Lee Jae Myung’s request to President Marcos, to face charges of running a narcotics network from his cell.

Weeks before that handover, however, the prison break was being plotted. Around that time, a young Filipino was photographed dangling from a giant drone above the Sablayan port area. That photo went viral recently as it accompanied a news bit across global news channels, stating that it was a rehearsal to spring Park out of prison.

Doing an in-depth story, GMA’s “Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho” sought out the man photographed with the drone and identified him as NJ. NJ insisted he is not an accomplice in any such plot and that he had been out swimming with friends when they came across a Korean tourist showing off the huge drone. Fooling around, NJ volunteered to hang on to it and be dropped into the sea. If anything, he was used.

The plot itself, though, may be real. The hotel confirmed to the GMA team that a Korean guest calling himself “Mr. Kim” stayed 18 days without paying. “Julia,” the uploader’s sister, said the man returned several times looking for her sibling, though she could not confirm it was the same person. Sablayan police are still tracing those involved.

Understandably, Bureau of Corrections chief Gregorio Pio Catapang Jr. was quick to say the plot would have failed because a drone would be too big and too noisy to carry a 75-kg person. He added that the penal colony is a no-fly zone with watchtowers operating 24/7. 

Still, this is an interesting case not just for prison authorities but also for civil aviation officials, who should hear alarm bells about the future use of drones, not just in great escapes, but in crimes. The government must be keen on policy on drone technology and its use in the country.

As it is, drones mounted with cameras already trample on a lot of rights, from trespassing and voyeurism to prying into private lives. And what about espionage? Not so far-fetched, with many of the drones here China-made, raising questions about where data ends up.

In global conflicts, we’ve already seen how Hamas’s 2023 assault on Israel and the Russia-Ukraine war employed drones dropping bombs and grenades. Manila needs mandatory registration and operator licensing, geofencing around prisons and camps, stiffer penalties, data-security standards for imported drones, and clear counter-drone authority.

China’s drone industry is advancing aggressively. The company EHang, whose EH216-S won the world’s first type, production, and operator certificates from China’s CAAC, is offering its Global Fast Track Program to regulators like our very own Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines.

To boost tourism, sandboxes for island-hopping passenger flights on drones within five to 10 years are already being projected. With the technology rapidly advancing, the dangers of human flight via drones, like pilot error and battery or fuel loss, would soon be very low risks. 

But with mass deployment and AI, hacking, GPS spoofing, midair collisions, storms over open sea, smuggling, and rogue operators would still be risks. By that time, if Park Wang-yeol is returned to Philippine prison — maybe a drone-assisted prison break.

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