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| Southeast Asia |
| Philippines arrests Abu Sayyaf member |
| 2006-04-26 |
| Philippine soldiers arrested a Muslim militant with links to al Qaeda suspected of a series of kidnappings and bombings since 2000 that killed Americans and Filipinos, an army spokesman said on Tuesday. Major Bartolome Bacarro said troops seized Sharie Amiruddin, a suspected member of the Abu Sayyaf group, on Monday in Zamboanga City on the southern island of Mindanao. "He was the planner of the Dos Palmas kidnapping," Bacarro told reporters, adding Amiruddin was also blamed for bomb attacks in three southern cities in 2002. In May 2001, a boatload of Abu Sayyaf rebels snatched 20 tourists and workers from the Dos Palmas resort on the western island of Palawan and brought them to the south, where most of them they were held in the jungle for several months. One American tourist, Guillermo Sobero, was beheaded by the rebels. Another American, Martin Burnham, was killed during a rescue operation by elite troops and his wife, Gracia, was shot in the leg. The Burnhams, Christian missionaries working in the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines, were held for more than a year. Bacarro said Amiruddin had been under surveillance for weeks after the military got information the Abu Sayyaf was plotting to bomb shopping malls and public parks in Zamboanga during Easter holidays earlier this month. The plans were disrupted when the supposed bomb-maker was killed during a raid by police and soldiers on a hideout outside Zamboanga two weeks ago, a senior police intelligence official said. Three days after that raid, security forces stormed another Abu Sayyaf hideout in a Muslim village in Zamboanga, confiscating blasting caps and materials for making crude bombs. |
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| Posted by: Captain America 2006-04-26 10:56 |