JEDDAH, 26 October 2007 — THE INVESTIGATION into the huge explosion last week at the Glorietta 2 shopping center in Makati that left 11 people dead and 100 injured is seemingly being manipulated by the Arroyo administration to suit its needs.

On the day of the blast itself, police investigators told the media that traces of military-grade plastic explosives had been found at the scene. That seemed to indicate that the blast was a terrorist attack and not some sort of accident. On the second day after the blast, the media was reporting that it was a terror attack by a Muslim group, possibly the Rajah Solaiman Movement, after a phone caller claiming to be Ruben Omar Lavilla, the convert who speaks for the group, took responsibility for the blast. But leads on that path led to mobile phone numbers of members of the opposition in an apparent attempt to pin the blame of the attack on them.

After those leads fizzled out, weighed down by their own absurdity, investigators came up with the accident theory which claims that methane fumes from a basement sump pit that services bathrooms on upper floors of Glorietta 2, ignited and helped explode a nearby tank with 6,000 liters of diesel fuel used to run emergency power generators during brownouts. University of the Philippines chemistry professors have said that they seriously doubt this theory, pointing out that diesel does not ignite at temperatures below 220 degrees Celsius.

Ayala Land Inc. president Jaime Ayala says that the mall’s maintenance personnel had not reported anything abnormal in the basement of Glorietta 2 prior to the blast. Other news reports claim that repair work was being carried out in the basement at the time of the blast, and that Ayala is refusing to admit that. But I find it hard to believe that a blue-chip company like Ayala would take any risks with their property. I have been a regular visitor to Ayala-owned malls, and from what I have seen they spare no expense in building and maintaining their malls.

Detained Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV said on Thursday that he has several witnesses being kept in a safe house who are ready to testify that the blast was the brainchild of National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales and Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. It would not surprise me if the Arroyo administration was behind this blast. After all, with all of the negative attention the administration has been getting with the kickback-bloated ZTE broadband deal and the disbursement of P120 million by Malacañang Palace to congressmen and provincial officials, something was needed to take away the heat from the corrupt practices of the Palace.

All the parts of the whole Glorietta complex have supposedly been closed down to the public now by Makati City officials, who want to make sure the rest of the complex is safe. Let us wait to hear what Trillanes’ witnesses have to say about this blast. Diesel fuel blowing up on its own just doesn’t cut it in my book.

* * *

‘The Kingdom’ Is a Pretty Good Movie

I WAS finally able to watch “The Kingdom” Wednesday night after I got my hands on a DVD copy of the film. Arab News has run many articles on the new Peter Berg action-thriller film starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, about a crack FBI team that is allowed into Saudi Arabia for only five days after bloody attack on a Western housing compound in Riyadh.

The movie has unfortunately been banned in Kuwait and Bahrain for allegedly not being accurate. The film does combine elements from the 1996 Alkhobar bombing of the US military with the 2003 attack on a housing compound in Riyadh. But I call that artistic license, and in my book that is okay as long as the wider picture is basically right, which it is.

The movie begins with an informative montage showing the beginning of US-Saudi relations that began with the discovery of oil in the Kingdom by Americans in 1931, all the way through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with King Abdul Aziz in 1945 aboard a US warship on the Bitter Lake in Egypt, to clips of former Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Bandar ibn Sultan speaking about Al-Qaeda and terrorism on CNN’s Larry King show.

I found Foxx’s extended bonding sessions with his young son, and Garner’s excessive like of lollipops, annoying. The Saudi prince shown in the film is much too young, but apart from these minor quibbles, I found the film to be gripping and accurate in its portrayal of the Kingdom’s fight against terrorism. Sure it focuses too much on the American FBI team, but hey this is an American movie after all. If we Saudis had a movie industry to speak of, we could have made our own films on this topic. Unfortunately we do not, and Abu Dhabi and the Arizona desert had to double as Saudi Arabia, since the film was not allowed to be shot in the Kingdom.

The government should seriously consider allowing foreign filmmakers access to filming here in the Kingdom, if this country wants a more realistic and balanced view of this country and society portrayed to the rest of the world. Keeping foreigners out, including film crews, only breeds suspicion and fuels negative stereotypes of Saudi Arabia, something we certainly don’t need more of.

* * *

Comments or questions? E-mail me at: [email protected]. Visit my blog at: http://rasheedsworld.blogspot.com.