In a wild occurrence that took place over about half a month, a megachurch pastor named Apollo Quiboloy finally surrendered to the police and was arrested after a two-week-long standoff. The lengthy standoff incident took place in the Philippines, at Qiboloy’s sprawling, 74-acre megachurch compound in Davao City, which is located in the Philippines’s Davao Region.

Quiboloy had, prior to the standoff incident, managed to amass a substantial following through his televangelist operation, which he led and was called Kingdom of Jesus Christ. However, while he was doing the televangelist and megachurch routine, he was also suspected of child sex trafficking, amongst other horrific crimes, by the authorities.

Amongst those who wanted Quiboloy was the FBI, which put him on the FBI’s Most Wanted list over the sex trafficking charges, for which he was also indicted by the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ accused Quiboloy of trafficking young women into the United States for sex, and of manipulating those young women into having sex with him. He claimed that was “God’s will.”

So, the police went to arrest him on those horrific charges, and Quiboloy holed up inside the compound alongside numerous members of his congregation. That is what led to the weeks-long standoff, as Quiboloy was there alongside numerous innocent members of the church. Eventually, Quiboloy surrendered, and his attorney, Israelito Torreon, said that he did so to end the suffering of his followers.

“This is to inform the Filipino People that Pastor Apollo C. Quiboloy decided to surrender to the PNP/AFP because he does not want the lawless violence to continue to happen in the KOJC Compound and he could not bear to witness a second longer the sufferings that his flock was experiencing for many days,” Torreon said, commenting on the matter.

Torreon added, commenting on the police raid that led to the church compound standoff and why Quiboloy surrendered, “Heart-wrenching and mind-boggling events transpired where a warrant of arrest has been turned into a license to convert his beloved KOJC Compound into a police garrison, the sacred KOJC Cathedral being desecrated, the JMC School turned into a mining pit, his followers as recipients of brutalities, one of whom even died, scores injured, many got arbitrarily arrested, vehicles unilaterally confiscated, all of which caused Pastor Apollo Quiboloy’s heart to bleed.”

Torreon then added, framing Quiboloy in a positive light and framing his surrender to the law enforcement authorities as the “ultimate sacrifice,” “Hence, even if he has the right to await the result of the legal remedies being resorted to by his lawyers, he decided to make the ultimate sacrifice by surrendering himself to the PNP and AFP.”

Commenting on the massive scope of the operation that took down Quiboloy, Philippine National Police Director for Police Community Relations, Brig. Gen. Roderick Augustus Alba claimed, “It’s because PRO-11 (Davao unit) does not have enough resources in terms of human and material resources, considering this high-profile case involving the leader of a big church group. It really needs support from other units. The area is too big compared to Camp Crame, actually approximately 32 hectares, so the more than 2,000 personnel earlier deployed is, in fact, not enough.”

Watch ANC 24/7, the cable news network in the Philippines, report on the matter here:

Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video