Zamboanga dealer busted for P8.1-M 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.

Brig. Gen. Bowenn Joey Masauding, director of the Police Regional Office-9, was quoted 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 at Upper HB Home in 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 Eling was touted as an accomplice of the now detained drug den operator Wajid Ibrahim Galib, entrapped in an uptown area in Cotabato City on March 9, 2024 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.