La Union syndicate linked to shabu labs in S. Luzon?

CAMP DIEGO SILANG, La Union – Police here are coordinating with their colleagues in Quezon and Laguna to check possible links between the syndicate behind the shabu laboratory recently busted in Naguilian, La Union and the maintainers of similar illegal facilities raided in the two Southern Luzon provinces the other day.

Senior Superintendent Noli Taliño, La Union police director, told The STAR that the task force headed by Chief Superintendent Ramon Gatan is checking if the three Chinese and two Taiwanese nationals arrested in Southern Luzon were the same five Chinese chemists who worked in the shabu lab in Naguilian, as the facility’s caretaker, Dante “Tomas” Palaganas, told probers.

According to Palaganas, the five Chinese chemists would go to the shabu lab in Barangay Bimmotobot, Naguilian town four times a week and worked at night to manufacture shabu.

He said the Chinese, along with George Cordero, who leased the farmhouse where the lab was put up, were able to sneak out finished products to Manila.

Chemicals and equipment which could produce shabu worth up to a trillion pesos were seized in Naguilian.

The raids in Quezon and Laguna yielded shabu chemicals worth about P300 million.

Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency Director General Dionisio Santiago said the five suspects arrested in Southern Luzon together with a Filipino cohort belong to the Ah-Chang drug syndicate, which has links to the Chin San Lin transnational syndicate operating in Asia.