ZAMBOANGA CITY, 12 May 2007 — The four children of Indonesian militant Dulmatin, a suspect in the deadly Bali bombings in 2002, were found during a raid on a suspected rebel hideout in the southern Philippines, a military spokesman said yesterday.
Soldiers and policemen found the children yesterday when they raided a hideout of suspected members of the JI and Abu Sayyaf groups in the southern island of Tawi-Tawi, near the Philippine border with Sabah, Malaysia.
Maj. Eugene Batara, a regional army spokesman, said the children included one boy and three girls aged 2, 5, 7 and 9.
They were flown to Zamboanga City onboard a military plane and were immediately taken to a military hospital for medical check-up.
At the hospital, doctors and soldiers tried to comfort them as they cried, apparently scared of the attention they were getting. The eldest tried to flee and she had to be restrained.
Lt. Mike Rayman, another military spokesman, said the children would be handed over to the Bureau of Immigration in Manila.
The children were previously thought to be hiding with Abu Sayyaf militants in Jolo island, where Dulmatin’s wife, Istiada Bt. H. Oemar Sovie, alias Amenah Toha, and her two other children were caught in October last year.
The military said Istiada and her six children arrived in the Philippines in August 2003 to join Dulmatin, who sought refuge in the strife-torn island of Mindanao to evade a manhunt by Indonesian authorities.
Before she was deported to Indonesia, Istiada told military investigators that her husband and several JI experts were living with Abu Sayyaf rebels on Jolo.
Dulmatin is reportedly in Jolo with fellow Indonesian Umar Patek, who is also wanted in Indonesia for the October 2002 bombings in the resort island of Bali, in which 202 mostly foreign tourists were killed.
The JI has also been blamed for the 2004 bombing of a Filipino ferry off Manila Bay that killed 116 people — the second-worst terrorist attack in Southeast Asia after the 2002 Bali bombings. It was also blamed by Philippine authorities in a series of bombings in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 and wounded more than 100 people. One of the bombs exploded at an open square less than a hundred meters from the US Embassy.
The US government has offered a $10 million bounty for the capture of Dulmatin, an electronics specialist said to have been trained in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He is alleged to be a senior figure in the Jemaah Islamiyah organization.
Dulmatin fled to Mindanao in the southern Philippines soon after the August 2003 bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta.
He is one of four top JI leaders — including Umar Patek, Zulkifli bin Hir and Abdul Rahman Ayub — who trained local militants in the southern Philippines, according to Asian terror expert Zachary Abuza.
In 2005, Dulmatin called for JI suicide bombers to be sent to the Philippines for operations.
In January, Filipino soldiers killed an Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah militant, Gufran, and five other Filipino Abu Sayyaf members in a clash at sea off Tawi-Tawi while trying to escape to Sabah.
