P1-M worth of shabu seized in Region 12 police operation

COTABATO CITY — Policemen confiscated P1 million worth of shabu from two dealers, said to have links with both the Dawlah Islamiya and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters. They were entrapped in Pikit town in Cotabato province on Sunday.

Brig. Gen. Percival Augustus Placer, director of the Police Regional Office-12, told reporters on Tuesday that the duo, whose names he withheld in the meantime, are now clamped down in a detention facility of the Pikit Municipal Police Station.

One of them is a resident of Fort Pikit area in Pikit, Cotabato while the other hails from Barangay Kalbugan in nearby Pagalungan town in Maguindanao del Sur. There are secluded areas in the two towns that are bastions of the Dawlah Islamiya and the BIFF, both known for providing drug traffickers sanctuary in exchange for money.

Placer said that the two suspects were immediately arrested by a team of plainclothes agents from different units of PRO-12, the Cotabato Provincial Police Office and the municipal police force after selling to them 150 grams of shabu, costing P1 million, in a tradeoff in Barangay Ladtingan in Pikit last Sunday.

Placer said it was local officials and barangay leaders who reported their shabu peddling activities, enabling police units under PRO-12 to promptly plan the sting that led to their arrest and confiscation from them of P1 million worth of shabu.