RI militants held in Malaysia: Report

RI militants held in Malaysia: Report

Reuters, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia is holding in detention six Indonesians caught returning
from a Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) training camp in the southern
Philippines, a senior security official told Reuters on Saturday.

The security source said the six men were caught several weeks
ago, but their arrest kept quiet.

"They were all Indonesians on their way home from the southern
Philippines where they had been at a JI training camp," the
source told Reuters.

They were discovered among a boatload of illegal immigrants
arrested while trying to enter Malaysia's state of Sabah near
Sandakan, a port on the northeast coast of Borneo, just across
the Sulu Sea from the islands of the southern Philippines.

It is a favored route for militants. There is large flow of
illegal migrants through Borneo as the island is shared between
Indonesia, Malaysia and the tiny sultanate of Brunei, and the
coastline and interior are hard to patrol.

The source said one of the men, known as "Denny", was a
trainer at a camp hosted by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF) in the restive southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

Philippines intelligence officials wish to question Denny and
he may be sent back, though for now all six men were being held
in Kamunting detention camp in northern Malaysia, the source
said.

Malaysia is holding some 72 JI suspects, and up to 18 members
of a local group called Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM), under a
security law allowing detention without trial.

Around 46 of the prisoners in Kamunting began a hunger strike
last week to protest the conditions of their imprisonment.

JI, a Southeast Asian offshoot of al-Qaeda, is believed to
have been behind the Bali bombings in late 2002 and the suicide
bomb attack on the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta last year.