LINGAYEN – The Police in Region I are now on the trail of a big drug syndicate involved in the setting up the mobile shabu laboratory sometime in September in a secluded area of Burgos where it apparently manufactured methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu.

Police Regional Director Chief Supt. Leopoldo Bataoil of Police Regional Office I said, the PNP Crime Laboratory in Camp Crame confirmed last Oct. 17 that it was a mobile shabu laboratory that camped in barangay Anapo, Burgos to make shabu.

Bataoil, who just assumed command as police regional director last Oct. 24, inspected the items seized from the abandoned camp of the drug syndicate last Thursday when he arrived in Pangasinan to pay his courtesy call on Gov. Victor Agbayani.

“If it turned out positive, it means that the mobile laboratory is in existence and I want this to be tracked down as soon as possible,” Bataoil said.

He asked the people of Pangasinan and Region I to help the police in monitoring the movement of the mobile shabu laboratory and if possible identify the personalities involved.

“We must stop this. For as long as the mobile shabu laboratory is in our area, then we are endangering our population from the evils of illegal drugs,” Bataoil said.

He said it was a good thing that the police in Pangasinan got the evidence oh hand because it confirms suspicions that drug syndicates devised another means to operate without being detected by lawmen.

Bataoil said the PNP Crime Laboratory confirmed that eth contents of one container is liquid shabu which when it vaporizes turn into crystalline granules.

That liquid, according to Helen Maranon of the PNP Crime Laboratory in Pangasinan, is thionyl chloride identified as one of the dangerous drugs in the anti-drugs law or Republic Act No. 9165.

Asked if this was the first mobile shabu laboratory ever discovered by the police, Bataoil said he does not know the score in other regions but added it is a fact that this is an illegal activity that must be stopped at all cost.

“If it is operating in Region I, no doubt it can operate also in other regions of the country,” Bataoil said.

He said stationary shabu laboratories in Metro Manila and other parts of the country were already raided and dismantled by the police and other law enforcement agencies.

Bataoil hinted the possibility that the paraphernalia seized in Burgos may have been moved at one time on board a closed van or possibly landed from the sea as Burgos is along the shore of the South China sea.

Burgos is just at the Pangasinan-Zambales border.

Police Provincial Director Alan Purisima said they already knew certain persons who were in the vicinity of the area where the syndicate made shabu but who professed they did not know that something unusual was happening there.

These persons said they say some vehicles in the area at that time and never doubted that people there were making shabu.

Purisima said it was Burgos Mayor Domingo Doctor who called him up last September 29.

It took a week more before the incident was reported by the police to the media supposedly for security reason. (PNA)