COTABATO CITY, Philippines, 19 April — The man tagged by police as a prime suspect in the bomb scare in Metro Manila and other key cities in Mindanao once worked with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the separatist group itself revealed yesterday.

MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said Rogelio ‘Roger’ Adamat, an engineer, was at one time part of the technical committee of the Front’s peace panel during the presidency of Joseph Estrada.

“But Mr. Adamat had never been an organic member of the MILF,” Kabalu said in media interviews.

Kabalu said that other than Adamat there were two more personalities who are none organic member of the MILF but who became part of the technical committee. These were Allan Flores, a Christian lawyer from Iligan City, and Ignacio Ikling, a native of Kidapawan in North Cotabato province, representing the Bagobo tribal group.

“Adamat and Ikling left voluntarily from the technical committee when Estrada started his ‘all-out war’ against the MILF and the Bangsamoro people sometime in the early part of year 2000,” said Kabalu.

Flores stood firm with the MILF side so that when the negotiation resumed under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, his position was elevated to the five-member MILF negotiating peace panel currently chaired by Vice Chairman Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim.

Fingerprints

Adamat alleged role in the bomb scare was discovered through comparison of a thumbprint left behind in a plastic bag at an MRT station in Manila and his fingerprints at the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI.)

There were also personal witnesses who were able to identify Adamat through video cameras as the one who planted the bomb at the MRT station.

Although the bombs planted were made of real explosives, police said these were not meant to explode but to scare.

The bombs were accompanied with warnings from an obscure group called the Indigenous People Federal Army (IPFA).

Officials said they were able to confirm that Adamat had been to Pakistan and Malaysia in 1999, although they did not say if these travels had any bearings with the bomb scare.

Suspected extremists in the southern Philippines have been said to have traveled either to Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Kabalu, however, downplayed allegations that the MILF was working along with the IFPA led by Adamat.

At the height of the bomb scare when authorities said the IFPA was just a non-existent group, an MILF official was quoted vouching that the group was real.

But Kabalu said that statement did not necessarily mean the MILF had ties with the IFPA. He said as a man claiming to be spokesman of IFPA said on radio, his group was standing alone for and in behalf of the estimated 16 million indigenous people throughout the country, and that it has no connection with the other revolutionary organizations, such as, the MILF, MNLF or Communists.