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Senior Philippine Officials Possibly Involved in Drug Trade
High-ranking government officials are probably involved in the complex web of the illegal drug trade in the Philippines, National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) director Reynaldo Wycoco said Saturday.
Wycoco made this statement in a dzMM radio interview following last Sunday's arrest of a town mayor in the northern province of Quezon in a drug bust that yielded some 500 kilograms of methamhetamine hydrochloride, locally called shabu.
Mayor Ronnie Mitra and three others were arrested while trying to ship 498 kilograms of shabu to Manila by a government-issued ambulance.
The confiscated shabu, estimated at one billion pesos (about 20 million U.S. dollars) on the local black market, was the second biggest single capture so far this year, police said.
The number of users of illegal drugs, particularly shabu, has increased to some 1.8 million this year in the country, police said.
According to police, nearly 20,000 drug offenders were arrested in the first half of this year.
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