ILIGAN CITY — Agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) arrested four people, two of them local government officials, in a drug operation at Barangay Tucod here on Wednesday morning.
Arrested were Hussien Magandia, a provincial board member in Lanao del Sur; his wife Norhaimah; and their son, Aktar.
Also arrested was the couple’s son-in-law, Amin Dimal, a councilor in Marawi City.
The arrest came as PDEA agents served the suspects a search warrant issued by the Regional Trial Court Branch 16 in Kabacan, North Cotabato province.
Drugs, guns
Seized from the suspects were half a kilogram of suspected “shabu” (crystal meth), a .38-caliber revolver, bullets, electronic gadgets and bank records.
“So far, they are the biggest ‘narcopoliticians’ [we have] arrested,” Juvenal Azurin, PDEA director in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said during a press conference in Cagayan de Oro City on Wednesday afternoon.
PDEA said the suspects belonged to the “Iwaram Drug Group.”
Azurin said Magandia and Dimal were not on President Duterte’s original list of local officials suspected of involvement in illegal drugs. He said it took the PDEA about a year to verify the suspects’ involvement in the illicit trade.
Surveillance
“We were very careful in conducting the validation considering the fact that these personalities were prominent,” he said, adding that they spent several months conducting surveillance and intelligence gathering before carrying out the operation on Wednesday.
Azurin said their reports indicated that the substance confiscated from the suspects came from an inmate at New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City. He, however, did not name the group’s supposed supplier.
He said the suspects, which the PDEA described as distributors, operated in Lanao del Sur and some parts of Lanao del Norte province.
From these provinces, they distribute the illegal substance to a network of runners and drug pushers who sell shabu to other areas in Mindanao.
The suspects were operating a car wash and a rice mill in Iligan City which, Azurin claimed, were being used to cover their drug deals.
The Inquirer tried to get the suspects’ statements but they declined to issue any statement. They were held at the PDEA Northern Mindanao office’s detention cell in Cagayan de Oro while charges were being prepared against them. —Reports from Divina M. Suson and Jigger J. Jerusalem