Malaysian police arrest 2 suspected JI members

Malaysian police arrest 2 suspected JI members

Associated Press, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysian police have arrested two suspected members of a cell of Jamaah Islamiyah, an Islamic group suspected in a string of plots and attacks in Southeast Asia, a government official said on Sunday.

The two men, both Malaysian religious teachers in their 30s, were detained early Saturday in Sandakan, a town in Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo island, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The suspects, whose identities were not revealed, were part of a cell that arranged accommodation and transport for new Jamaah Islamiyah recruits traveling through Malaysia on their way to camps in the southern Philippines for military training, the official said.

Last month, police in Sandakan arrested two other alleged members of the cell.

All four suspects had been fairly active in the past but had not carried out work for Jamaah Islamiyah in recent months, the official said. Their cell leader was believed to have escaped to Indonesia in late 2001.

"Police hope to get fresh leads from the suspects on the extent of (Jamaah Islamiyah's) activities in this region," the official said.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, commenting on Saturday's arrests, said more Jamaah Islamiah members might be detained soon.

The authorities knew their movements and would arrest them "when the time came," Mahathir was quoted as saying by the Bernama national news agency.

Jamaah Islamiyah is the main suspect in the Oct. 12 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that killed more than 190 people, mostly foreign tourists.

Security officials say Jamaah Islamiyah has ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network and accuse it of planning attacks on U.S. and other Western diplomatic missions in Singapore and Malaysia.

Since mid-2001, authorities in mostly Muslim Malaysia have arrested more than 70 suspected Islamic militants, including dozens of alleged members of Jamaah Islamiyah. They are being held under strict security laws allowing indefinite detention without trial.

"They have been arrested under the ISA," a spokesman at federal police headquarters said, referring to the Internal Security Act, used extensively by authorities for nearly two years now to hold without trial suspected Islamic militants.

The group, which aims to turn Malaysia, the southern Philippines and Indonesia into an Islamic state, was linked to the al-Qaeda network accused of the September 2001 attacks on the United States, regional authorities say.

Malaysia, which had begun arresting suspected Islamic militants even before the September attacks, said last November that those in its custody had been identified as Jamaah Islamiah operatives or sympathizers, with many having received military training in Afghanistan.

Regional security officials have said that Jamaah Islamiyah members received arms and bomb-making training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and in camps in the southern Philippines run by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a rebel group.

Malaysia's Sabah state has close geographic and historical ties to the southern Philippines, a mostly Muslim region in the predominantly Catholic Philippines where the government has been battling insurgencies for years.

Sabah is a short boat ride from the southern Philippines. Jamaah Islamiyah wants to establish a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia covering Malaysia, the southern Philippines and Indonesia.