BANNER STORY/ PNP report’s time gap raises some questions
BURGOS – Officials of Pangasinan will investigate the recovery of about a truckload of assorted plastic containers and other paraphernalia that were believed to still contain substances for making methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu in a remote hilly area in barangay Anapao here last September 28.
Vice Gov. Oscar Lambino noted that while these gadgets and items were discovered last September 28, it was only last October 6 that the police formally announced the discovery of these items, all believed to strongly indicate a mobile drug laboratory.
Lambino, executive director of the Pangasinan Anti-Drug Abuse Council, said the provincial board of which he is the presiding officer, will invite officials of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA and the police to shed light on the discovery of the seized items on Friday.
Lambino wants to know particularly why it took more than one week for the Police Provincial Office to make public the discovery of these paraphernalia, and how the suspected members of a drug syndicate apparently outwitted them and managed to leave the area, apparently in a hurry.
Burgos Mayor Domingo Doctor believed that those who left the paraphernalia on a lot owned by one Willy Bonilla of Burgos camped there for some two days to concoct or manufacture shabu, using the banned substance called ephedrine.
He said this will be officially known as soon as the PNP Crime Laboratory in Manila confirms samples of containers seized by lawmen at the site, many of them believed to still contain residues of still unknown substances.
One of the containers was still full of an unknown substance, possibly ephedrine, it was learned.
If this turned out to be a drug laboratory, it will indicate the first time and confirm suspicions that members of a syndicate have resorted to mobile laboratory to manufacture shabu, a strategy they may have adopted after several of their fixed laboratories in Metro Manila were raided and dismantled by lawmen.
It could also be the first time that police discovered such an abandoned paraphernalia believed to be for shabu-making in Pangasinan, although about seven years ago in 1999, an actual landing of a big volume of metamphetamine hydrochloride from China occurred in Infanta town, just a few kilometers from this town.
