INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Malaysian police authorities have arrested three undocumented Filipinos following a raid on a house in Labuan town in Sabah, Malaysia, the state-run news agency Bernama reported on Tuesday.
The report did not name the arrested suspects but added that one of them was a 59-year-old man, who was peddling shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride).
Quoting Supt. Adzhar Othman, Bernama said that a police narcotics team raided an unnumbered house in Kampong Saguking and arrested the elderly man, along with two other men – aged 26 and 29 – on Monday evening.
Seized from the older man, Adzhar said, were 14 plastic sachets of white crystalline substance weighing more than six grams.
The seized substance could fetch up to RM1,000 (about P12,000).
The three suspects all tested positive for drug use, according to Adzhar.
All three men had been charged under Malaysia’s Dangerous Drugs Act.
More than 1,100 out of the 2,940 Filipinos being detained in various prison facilities in Sabah, Malaysia, face drug-related charges, according to the state’s prisons’ director.
The state-run Bernama said in a report quoting Sabah Prisons Director Ab Basir Mohamad that “about 40 percent of the Filipino inmates are serving sentences for drug offenses.”
There are 6,500 inmates in various jails in Sabah and 58 percent of them or 3,770 are foreigners, according to Basir.
Of the number of foreign inmates, 78 percent (2,940) were Filipinos, 17 percent were Indonesians and the remaining percentage a mixture of nationalities, he added.
It was not immediately known if any of the Filipino inmates there were on death row.
Malaysia’s Dangerous Drugs Act, which was revised in 1989, prescribes death penalty for convicted drug traffickers.
Drug trafficking in Malaysia is described as the possession of at least 15 grams of heroin and other illegal substance or 200 grams of cannabis.