The case of a former mayor of a small town in the Philippines who is accused of working with organized crime and has been questioned about whether she was born in China has gripped the country for months. This week, she was arrested in Indonesia after fleeing, the Philippine authorities said, and faced extradition.
In March, the police searched an online gambling operation at an office in the town of Bamban — where the accused former mayor, Alice Guo, was still in office — and said in statements that the gambling company was a front for online scams and human trafficking.
Philippine senators questioned Ms. Guo in May at a hearing about accusations that she had ties to organized crime. They also asked whether she had misled the authorities about being a natural born citizen, a requirement for holding public office in the Philippines.
Ms. Guo and her lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday. She has previously rejected all accusations of wrongdoing and said that she is a natural born citizen of the Philippines.
Online casinos, known in the Philippines as POGOs, or Philippine Offshore Gambling Operations, have a reputation of being linked to organized crime. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced a ban on them in July.
Philippine investigators said in June that they had found Ms. Guo’s fingerprints to be identical to those of a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping but that they could not be certain about her origin based on that evidence alone.
Alice Guo’s Philippine birth certificate, which was registered in 2005, says she was born in 1986, but the National Bureau of Investigation has said Guo Hua Ping was born in 1990.
The Senate committee summoned Ms. Guo again on June 26, but she did not show up. The authorities said she fled the Philippines by boat to avoid being detected at immigration checkpoints and arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on July 18. She reached Singapore three days later, and then Indonesia on Aug. 18, according to the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission.
The ombudsman’s office, which investigates and prosecutes public officials, removed her from office in August.
Last week, the Philippines’ Anti-Money Laundering Council said it filed charges against Ms. Guo, along with 35 others, linked to laundering money from crimes including human trafficking. The body said Ms. Guo and her associates had built up assets worth more than $100 million through those operations.
Ms. Guo was elected as mayor of Bamban, a town of about 80,000 roughly 50 miles north of Manila, the capital, as an independent candidate in 2022.
Before being elected, she leased her 20-acre property in the town to a gambling company and helped it with local government paperwork, according to the investigators. When the compound was searched this year, the police said they found hundreds of foreign nationals running online scams.
In the early hours of Wednesday, the Indonesian police arrested Ms. Guo in Tangerang, a city near Jakarta, the capital. Raffy Tulfo, a Philippines senator, told reporters that Ms. Guo was expected to arrive in Manila on Thursday night, escorted by law enforcement officials.
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