57 foreigners nabbed in drug busts last year

A total of 57 foreigners were arrested in drug busts last year and police seized more than 1,000 kilos of shabu worth some P2 billion from foreigners nationwide, a citizens’ group said yesterday.

Quoting police reports, the Citizens’ Drug Watch Foundation said 43 of the suspects — 39 Chinese men, two Chinese women, an Australian and a Taiwanese — could face the death penalty.

The report did not count Filipinos arrested for alleged involvement in drug trafficking or whether the number of arrests of foreigners declined or increased from the previous year.

The biggest single bust last year was in October when 498 kilos of shabu was seized at a police checkpoint in Real town, Quezon Province.

Police arrested a Quezon town mayor, a Chinese national, and two Filipinos allegedly hauling the drugs aboard a van and an ambulance to Metro Manila.

Police also seized 350 kilos of shabu from three Chinese men during an anti-drug operation in Zambales last year.

Police said much of the shabu sold in the country comes from China.

Two bills filed in Congress seek the following measures:

• Deprive convicted drug offenders of probation, and require the confinement and rehabilitation of known drug users.

• Set up a special criminal court to try drug cases and speed up the prosecution of drug offenders.

Meanwhile, an informant who helped police seized some 60 kilograms of shabu in Manila and Pasay City was denied some P3 million in reward money due to a technicality.

Director Miguel Coronel, National Drug Enforcement and Protection (NDEP) chief, said the informant was not given his reward because the operation was "not properly coordinated" with his office.

Coronel also stopped the giving of a P1 million reward to another informant who tipped off police about a makeshift shabu laboratory in Pasig last month.

Narcotics Group chief Director Efren Fernandez said he will seek an amendment of the government’s reward system before "the problem goes out of hand" since informants risk their lives to gather the information police need.

"General Fernandez will make representations with the NDEP seeking an amendment of procedures on giving rewards to informers, considering they risk their lives," a source close to Fernandez told The STAR yesterday.

The source said Coronel could have tightened procedures on the reward system to prevent the money from going to the pockets of unscrupulous police officials.

"But the process of coordinating with the NDEP all major anti-drug operations would endanger the lives of informants," he said. "With all the money at their disposal, it is possible that big time drug syndicates have infiltrated the NDEP. And the informers could be at the organized group’s mercy if they found out about them leaking the information to the police."

The two informant who helped police bust the drug trafficking operations of the Hong Kong Triad in Manila were former workers in the syndicate’s warehouse in Paco. – Non Alquitran, Efren Danao