Malaysian, Filipino arrested in Marikina drug bust

Shabu. NIÑO JESUS ORBETA/INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — A Malaysian national and his Filipino friend were apprehended Tuesday morning in Marikina City in a drug bust operation.

Thevan Elamlathir and Alvin Nacario are now in police custody after they sold for P4,000 a sachet suspected to contain methamphetamine hydrochloride or “shabu” to an undercover policeman at around 7 a.m. on Tuesday along the St. Marcelin Champagnat Street in Barangay Marikina Heights. When frisked, the 30-year-old Nacario yielded two more sachets suspected to contain the same banned substance.

The drug bust was meant for Nacario who had evaded arrest sometime in September by shooting it out with authorities.

SPO1 Dionise Salcedo, a member of the Marikina police’s station anti-illegal drugs-special operation task group and the case investigator, said that Nacario, a former tricycle driver, was among the drug suspects who were the subject of their operation exactly two months ago that resulted in the arrest of Randy Domingo. Nacario fled after trading shots with lawmen.

Salcedo said that since then, the suspect had gone under the radar and returned to Marikina only early Tuesday. In this operation, Nacario didn’t resist arrest. The drugs seized from the two had an estimated value of P45,000.

At the time of the drug bust operation, the suspect was with Elamlathir, who claimed to be a truck driver in Malaysia. Authorities recovered from him a notebook containing what appeared to be drug transactions written in Bahasa. Vice Mayor Jose Fabian Cadiz, head of the city’s anti-drug abuse council, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in a phone interview that they also saw in it chemical ingredients supposedly used in producing the banned substance.

Cadiz said that as of Tuesday afternoon, they were still gathering more information on the Malaysian suspect, who arrived in the country last Sept. 24 and had been staying at a condominium-hotel in Makati City.

He said they were still determining if this was Elamlathir’s first time in the country, adding that his passport showed that he went to Indonesia early this year. The city official surmised that Elamlathir could be part of an international drug syndicate.

The two are currently detained at the Marikina police station and face a charge of conspiracy to sell illegal drugs. Nacario, on the other hand, faces another charge of possession of illegal drugs.  SFM