COTABATO, 28 January — The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said yesterday it was not aware that members of a militant Malaysian group had been receiving training at its camps.
Dozens of suspected Muslim militants have been detained in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines recently, with some linked to regional terror plots and to the Al-Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 attacks.
Malaysian police chief Norian Mai said last week that 19 of the 23 members of a group called Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) arrested since December 9 received militant training overseas.
Nine of them trained at Camp Abu Bakar run by the MILF in the southern Philippines, he said.
Several of the men were Singaporeans and Indonesians with permanent residency status in Malaysia.
But Eid Kabalu, MILF spokesman, was quoted by Malaysia’s official Bernama news agency as saying that the group did not have a policy of admitting foreigners into its training camps.
“We need to know the time they received the training, so that we can check,” he told Bernama.
Kabalu said there was a possibility that the nine KMM members could have disguised themselves as locals to enter the MILF camps and receive training.
“This is a possibility which we cannot discount,” he said.
The Philippine government signed a ceasefire agreement in October with the MILF, which fought for nearly 30 years for the creation of an independent Islamic state on the southern island of Mindanao.
Kabalu said the MILF, which has distanced itself from Al-Qaeda, was transparent in its operations and had no links with other groups in the region.
Malaysian authorities accuse the KMM of actively seeking to overthrow the secular government and install an Islamic state in multicultural Malaysia.
