Policemen seized crystal meth, known locally as shabu, worth P20.4 million from a dealer in Zamboanga City — a port city on the southwestern coast of Mindanao — on Wednesday, Philippine authorities said. Shabu, chemically methamphetamine hydrochloride, is among the most widely trafficked illegal drugs in the Philippines.

The suspect is now detained and awaiting prosecution for violation of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 — Republic Act 9165, the country's principal law penalizing the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. Officials of the Police Regional Office 9, the national police command for the Zamboanga Peninsula, and their counterparts in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, the Muslim-majority autonomous region in the southern Philippines, told reporters separately on Thursday.

The dealer's eight accomplices had earlier been caught in separate entrapment operations carried out in Cotabato City and in surrounding towns over the past 10 months — a stretch of anti-narcotics activity across central Mindanao.

Ranking police and Army intelligence officials said the dealer maintains links with drug dealers in Talitay, Maguindanao del Sur, and in Kapalawan town in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area in Soccsksargen. The Special Geographic Area consists of communities in Cotabato province placed under the administration of the Bangsamoro autonomous government, while Soccsksargen, also known as Region XII, groups South Cotabato, Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani and General Santos City.

Taken together, the Zamboanga sting and the earlier entrapment operations cut across three of Mindanao's administrative regions — Zamboanga Peninsula, the Bangsamoro autonomous region and Soccsksargen — tracing the cross-regional span of the network that officials described.

— John Felix M. Unson, BusinessWorld