ZAMBOANGA CITY, 25 March 2005 — An official of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) yesterday said the group is looking into a claim by a suspected Jemaah Islamiyah member that he has helped train separatists in the southern Philippines.
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu stressed that while the group has no ties with any terrorist group, its leaders want any doubt to be cleared.
“We have no links whatsoever with the Jemaah Islamiyah or other terror groups, such as the Abu Sayyaf, and the MILF leadership has repeatedly warned its members not to harbor terrorists. But just the same the MILF ordered an investigation into the allegations,” Kabalu said yesterday in a phone interview from his base in Central Mindanao.
Earlier this week, an Indonesian man whom the military arrested in the southern province of Maguindanao on terrorism charges, allegedly confessed to his interrogators that he and several other Jemaah Islamiyah members were helping local guerrillas in their war for a separate Islamic state in Mindanao.
Rohmat, who is also known as Zacky, admitted that MILF forces provided him sanctuary in Central Mindanao before his arrest on March 16 at a checkpoint in Datu Saudi Ampatuan town in Maguindanao province, a stronghold of the separatist group.
He said he entered the Philippines in year 2000 and trained MILF rebels in Camp Abubakar As-Siddique in Maguindanao and later Abu Sayyaf militants in making bombs and how to use cell phones to trigger explosions.
Rohmat said Filipino terror groups are plotting to attack civilian targets across the country.
Rohmat in a brief interview with reporters Wednesday, said the Abu Sayyaf was plotting major attacks in the southern cities of Davao and Cagayan de Oro and also in Manila.
“They said the plan was to be carried out in the last week of March,” Rohmat was quoted in press reports as saying.
Rohmat was implicated in bombings in two southern cities and of a passenger bus in the Makati financial center in Manila on Feb. 14 which killed eight and wounding 150 others.
He claimed the Abu Sayyaf paid a member of the MILF to help carry out the bombings.
Kabalu said the MILF was not involved in the terror plot and rejected suggestions his group had forged an alliance with the Abu Sayyaf or the Jemaah Islamiyah.
Manila is currently negotiating peace with the MILF, the country’s largest Muslim separatist rebel group, after forging a cease-fire in 2002.
The next round of peace talks is expected to resume next month in Malaysia, which is brokering the negotiations.
“We are really sincere with the peace talks. And we want peace to reign in the southern Philippines,” Kabalu said.
“There is a policy statement from the MILF leadership for all members to turn their backs on other groups,” he was also quoted by the Agence France Presse as saying.
“We are categorically denying that we will stage attacks. We are focused on the peace talks” set to resume early next month.
MILF commanders had also been told to “weed out and hold responsible” rogue members sheltering foreign militants who may jeopardize the peace process, Kabalu said.
The MILF is fighting for the establishment of a strict Islamic state in Mindanao, but the government said it would not allow the archipelago to be dismembered and instead offered the rebels limited autonomy in areas where they are actively operating.
The Abu Sayyaf, on the other hand, was originally also fighting for a Muslim self-rule, but resorted to banditry and terrorism. The Abu Sayyaf, which also appears on the United States’ list of terror groups, claimed responsibility for a bomb attack that killed more than 100 people on a ferry leaving Manila in February last year, in the worst known terrorist attack in the Philippines.
The group, which broke away from the former separatist rebel Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), claimed responsibility for the February 14 bombings of buses in Manila and the southern city of Davao, and the Gaisano shopping mall in General Santos, which killed 11 people and left over 100 injured.
