The early December Singapore and Malaysia arrests provided leads to a key arrest in the Philippines on January 15. Three hours before he was to board a plane from Manila to Bangkok, a joint operation by Philippines national police, the armed forces and immigration authorities nabbed a boyish 30-year-old Indonesian national named Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, then rounded up four alleged Filipino accomplices and seized a ton of TNT, 17 M-16 rifles, 300 detonators and other bomb-making apparatus in a house rented by al-Ghozi in General Santos City in Mindanao. It has now been confirmed that al-Ghozi is identical to "Mike", who in October slipped into Singapore to help JI members prepare for the truck bombings. He is also "Randy Ali" of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) special operations group and, according to one of his four accomplices, Mohamad Kiram, the mastermind of a December 30, 2000 bombing at a Manila light rail transit station that killed 22 people. His involvement in bombings in Indonesia is still under investigation.
This is excerpted from a much larger Asia Times article on the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore-Philippines axis. Good backgrounder. |