Southeast Asian group linked to al-Qaeda

Southeast Asian group linked to al-Qaeda

Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press, Kuala Lumpur

When Yazid Sufaat arrived home to Malaysia after months in
southern Afghanistan, police were waiting.

Authorities say his arrest has helped expose a Southeast Asian
terror network that has surprised governments and security
experts. They say its structure and capacities are frighteningly
similar to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.

Since December, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines have
all announced arrests of purported cell members suspected of
involvement in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Singapore,
Navy ships and other pro-Western targets in the wealthy city-
state.

Philippine National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said there
are indications that the militant group, which uses the name
Jemaah Islamiyah, has become "very active."

Investigators say its aim is to spread radical Islam across
the region -- a concept with scant support among a majority of
the region's Muslim residents. Indonesia and Malaysia are both
Muslim-majority nations, but their governments are secular. The
Philippines is mostly Roman Catholic, while Singapore is mostly
Christian or Buddhist.

Malaysian authorities say in their country, as many as 200
people are members of Kumpulan Militant Malaysia, a group with
ties to Jemaah Islamiyah. They include Yazid, who is suspected of
training in al-Qaeda camps and playing host to two of the Sept.
11 hijackers two years ago at his weekend home. He was arrested
Dec. 9 as he crossed from Thailand into Malaysia.

As authorities across the region piece together information
gleaned from separate investigations, they say it has become
increasingly clear that the group was linked to al-Qaeda and
possibly hoped to emulate it.

An Indonesian man in Philippines custody since Jan. 15 told
authorities there that he financed bombings that killed 22 people
in Manila in December 2000 with Jemaah Islamiyah money, according
to affidavits given to prosecutors Friday.

In the sworn statements, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, 31, said he
joined the group while he was a student in Pakistan in 1990-1995.
His arrest led authorities two days later to more than a ton of
explosives and 17 M-16 rifles in southern General Santos city in
the Philippines. In the affidavits, al-Ghozi said those
explosives were intended for attacks in Singapore.

"All this definitely shows a terrorist organization that is
working across the region, and not just in Singapore" said Dana
Robert Dillon, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Heritage
Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

The structure of the network -- individual cells operating
independently but able to call on each other for help in specific
tasks - was comparable to al-Qaeda, Dillon said.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller recently said for the first
time that some of the planning for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on
the United States took place in Malaysia.

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi, who were aboard the
hijacked American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon
on Sept. 11, visited Malaysia in January 2000, staying in an
apartment Yazid owned outside its largest city, Kuala Lumpur. The
future hijackers met an al-Qaeda operative suspected in the
deadly USS Cole bombing, said Malaysian officials on condition of
anonymity. Both attacks have been blamed on al-Qaeda.

Yazid also helped Zacarias Moussaoui, charged in the United
States with conspiring to kill thousands of people on Sept. 11,
when he visited Kuala Lumpur in Sept. 2000, officials allege.

Singapore alleges another fugitive, Indonesian cleric Riduan
Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, was a regional Jemaah Islamiyah
leader who organized physical and religious training in Malaysia
for activists while sending others to camps in Afghanistan.
Malaysian officials say he also sent recruits to rebel camps in
the Philippines.

U.S. authorities have praised cooperation from both Malaysia
and Singapore, and the United States sent troops to help train
the Philippine military in its fight against militant Islamic
groups there.

In Malaysia, officials told The Associated Press that Yazid
bought four tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be
used in explosives. Singapore said suspects in its custody had
stored the same amount of ammonium nitrate inside Malaysia and
were trying to get 17 tons more to be used in truck bombs. The
four tons Yazid bought were later moved out of Malaysia before
the December arrests, officials said, but they don't know exactly
when or to where.

Alan Dupont, an Asian security expert at the Australian
National University, said the reports indicate that al-Qaeda had
partnerships with fundamentalist Islamic groups in the region as
well as agents of its own who were "actively targeting,
developing plans, and financing."

He said he expects an "intelligence bonanza" from evidence
collected in Afghanistan that will shed more light on the
suspected links.