MANILA (Philippines): Philippine police arrested four men and seized 1.3 billion pesos ($30m) worth of methamphetamine on Friday in the second large drug bust in Manila in 10 days.

The men were in a van loaded with six wooden crates containing 272kg of crystal methamphetamine when they were intercepted by police, said Senior Superintendent Bartolome Tobias, head of the Philippine National Police anti-illegal drugs task force.

The arrests followed a tip from an informant.

“Each gram of drug the police are able to remove from our communities is already something because we are able to reduce the amount of drugs poisoning our people,” said Arturo Cacdac, chief of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.

He said one of the four suspects was a bulk supplier of drugs for street dealers and had been under surveillance for two months. The man, however, denied knowing the crates contained drugs and said he was paid 70,000 pesos ($1,530) to bring the boxes to nearby Cavite province.

Last week, the National Bureau of Investigation arrested four Canadian men suspected of trafficking drugs from Mexico in separate raids on posh condominiums. Agents recovered 100m pesos ($2.2m pesos) worth of cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA, which is similar to Ecstasy.—AP