RI police probes case of Manila terror suspect
RI police probes case of Manila terror suspect
Agencies, Jakarta/Manila
Indonesian police said on Saturday they were investigating the case of a man arrested in Manila believed to be a key member of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Philippine police had said the man was Indonesian, but national police spokesman Saleh Saaf told Reuters the 30-year-old was a Canadian citizen, who may have lived in Indonesia in the past.
"We've got the information that he did live in Indonesia from the Philippine police, which comes from the man himself...(and) we will now try to look into this, very, very carefully," Saaf said by phone from the town of Semarang, 400km east of Jakarta where investigations were going on.
"Of course we did investigate (his nationality) and...the fact is, he is a Canadian citizen of Arab descent," the police spokesman added.
Details remain sketchy in a case that has been linked to at least three Southeast Asian countries as well as Canada.
Saaf said initial inquiries over whether the man had links with Indonesia had proved fruitless although investigations would last for at least several days.
Indonesian police have been focusing on central Java, where there are strong historical Arab ties with the world's most populous Muslim country.
Singapore and Malaysia have arrested groups of alleged Islamic militants over the last month, linking them with al Qaeda and also saying they had cells in Indonesia.
Recent media reports have also speculated al Qaeda, blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks, is active among Indonesia's 210 million population, a charge Jakarta disputes.
A recent Canadian media report said a man of Arab descent believed to be the group's ring leader was still on the run and had a Canadian passport. It named him as "Sammy".
One of the aliases of the man arrested in the Philippines was "Sammy Salih Jamil" but it was not immediately known if they were the same person.
In the Philippines, AFP reported that the Philippine police said Saturday that the Indonesian arrested here in connection with a series of deadly bombings in 2000, has been linked to a terror plot in Singapore and al Qaeda network.
The Indonesian, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, was arrested on Tuesday based on information provided by Singapore that he was a key leader of the Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamic "terror group operating in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia," a police statement said.
Police also said they believed al-Ghozi had links to bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Al-Ghozi's arrest led police in the southern Philippines on Thursday to seize a cache of explosives and weapons meant for attacks on Southeast Asian countries and arrest three Muslim Filipino associates.
The police said that Al-Ghozi had provided funding and bomb components to a certain Mukhlis Yunos, the principal suspect in an investigation into deadly bomb blasts in Manila in December, 2000 that claimed over a dozen lives and left scores injured.
The Indonesian had been an explosives trainer with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a local Muslim separatist group that has since opened peace talks with the government, the police said.
He went to Singapore in October to "assist in the preparation for the bombing of the US and Israeli embassies, the Australian and British high commissions, U.S. companies and military installations," the police statement added.
Al-Ghozi was due to leave for Bangkok on the day he was arrested, the Philippine police said.