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| Southeast Asia |
| Philippines arrests MILF member over 2000 bombing |
| 2006-01-19 |
| Philippine security forces arrested a Muslim rebel suspected of ties to foreign Islamic militants in connection with bombings in the capital in 2000, officials and rebels said on Wednesday. Ustadz Abdulgani Pagao was on his way to pay his respects to a dead relative in Maguindanao town on the southern island of Mindanao when a team of soldiers and police arrested him on Tuesday, said an army intelligence official. "The police served him an arrest warrant for multiple murder," the official told Reuters. A police official said Pagao, a member of the country's largest Muslim rebel group Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), had been implicated in five coordinated bombings in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 people and wounded more than 100. The government said the attacks were planned and funded by the regional militant network Jemaah Islamiah and carried out by local Muslim rebels in revenge for the military's capture of guerrilla bases on Mindanao. The intelligence official said there were reports Pagao had attended an Islamic school in Libya with Ustadz Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, the late founder of Abu Sayyaf, one of four Muslim rebel groups in the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines. The military said Pagao's arrest could prove that active links exist between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and groups such as Abu Sayyaf, al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah. MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said Pagao was a member of the group's Islamic education committee but dismissed military claims about his ties with Abu Sayyaf as "baseless and mere speculation". "Our ceasefire panel filed a complaint against the government for the arrest of Ustadz Pagao," Kabalu said. A military official told Reuters the government panel agreed to a request by the MILF to visit Pagao at his detention cell at the national police headquarters in Manila "as soon as possible". A rebel delegation would be accompanied by representatives from the government and a Malaysian-led team of international peace monitors to check on Pagao's conditions at Camp Crame. On Monday, the chief negotiator for the MILF, Mohaqher Iqbal, told Reuters the two sides were "on the final stretch" of talks to strike a peace deal. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |