2 suspected BIFF shabu traders nabbed in North Cotabato

NORTH COTABATO --- Law enforcement agents arrested two drug traffickers reportedly helping fund the activities of a local Islamic State-inspired group.

Naravy Duquiatan, director for Region 12 of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, said Tuesday that Baljunaid Tumagantang Ali and Danny Ali Calungsod were arrested in separate operations early this week in Pikit town in North Cotabato.

Local officials in North Cotabato province have confirmed that the suspects, who are related to each other by blood, have links with the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, or BIFF.

The sources, among them members of the inter-agency peace and order councils in different North Cotabato towns, said the two were among the more than 50 peddlers of methamphetamine hydrochloride (shabu) in the province remitting proceeds of their activities to the group of BIFF leader Abu Toraife.

All three factions in the BIFF, one of which is led by Abu Toraife, operate in the fashion of the Islamic State.

Ali and Calungsod were arrested one after another in separate hideouts in Pikit by combined agents of PDEA-12, personnel of the Army’s 7th Infantry Battalion and the North Cotabato provincial police.

Duquiatan said the detained suspects are to be prosecuted for violation of the Philippine Dangerous Drugs Act using the shabu recovered from each of them as evidence. — LDF, GMA News