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.