Zamboanga dealer busted for P8.1-M worth of shabu, 'linked’ to dealers in other provinces

COTABATO CITY— Plainclothes policemen seized before dawn Friday P8.1 million worth of shabu from a dealer in Zamboanga City who reportedly has contacts in other southern provinces.

Radio reports here on Friday morning quoted Brig. Gen. Bowenn Joey Masauding, director of the Police Regional Office-9, as saying that shabu dealer Jul-Akmad Abbo Eling was immediately detained after selling almost one and one-fourth kilo of shabu, worth P8.1 million, to non-uniformed policemen during an entrapment operation in Upper HB Home, Barangay Sinunuc in Zamboanga City.

The sting that resulted in the arrest of the 36-year-old Eling and confiscation from him of P8.1 million worth of shabu was assisted by the office of Mayor John Dalipe, chairperson of the multi-sector Zamboanga City Peace and Order Council, according to Region 9 police officials.

Local executives in the Bangsamoro region, who are overtly supporting the government's anti-narcotics campaign, told reporters that Eling was touted as an accomplice of the now-detained drug den operator Wajid Ibrahim Galib. Galib was entrapped in an uptown area in Cotabato City last March 9 by agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Galib, 63, a public school teacher who hails from Tawi-Tawi, and two his two accomplices, John Lloyd Fernandez Compaña, 23, and the 25-year-old Ridzwan Ismael Abdulgani, are now being prosecuted by PDEA-BARMM in a court in Cotabato City.

Tipsters who helped PDEA-BARMM entrap Galib more than two months ago said on Friday that he is a friend of Eling and that they met clandestinely in Zamboanga City whenever he went home to Bongao, the capital town of Tawi-Tawi.