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Philippines warns terror threat remains despite arrests
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Philippines warns terror threat remains despite arrests
AFP - Saturday, March 6
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Philippines warns terror threat remains despite arrests
MANILA (AFP) - – Islamist militants continue to pose a serious terrorist threat in the Philippines despite a series of high-profile arrests of alleged bomb-makers, the military said Friday.
The crackdown has crippled cells devoted to making and planting improvised explosive devices, including roadside bombs similar to those in use in Afghanistan and Iraq, said the top military commander for the Manila area, Major General Reynaldo Mapagu.
However, he cautioned: "As long as there are groups or there are people who have ill motives, terrorism will always be a threat to all of us."
The latest known government operation on Wednesday led to the arrest of three men whom Mapagu described as "principal participants" in a group allegedly led by Abdul Basit Usman, one of the country's most wanted men.
Usman had sent the three to Manila to prepare bombings in the area, the military said in a statement.
Mapagu said they would stand trial for a series of blasts on the southern island of Mindanao over the past two years, including roadside bombs targeting military and police convoys that had claimed several lives and maimed others.
Pakistani intelligence services suggested earlier this year that a man named Usman had been killed in a US drone attack near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan but Mapagu said it was not the same person.
Usman, said by the military to be connected to foreign terrorist groups Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf, has a compact circle of bomb-makers numbering "in the vicinity of double digits," Mapagu told a news conference.
However following the latest arrests, he added: "The number that they have is down to close to single digits." The three were arrested in a southern Manila slum populated by tens of thousands of Muslim migrants.
However, Mapagu said Jemaah Islamiyah members hiding in the southern Philippines to evade prosecution for the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia, as well as the 400-strong Abu Sayyaf, had their own people designing and manufacturing bombs.
Western intelligence agencies say these groups, also thought to have ties with Al-Qaeda, want to create a pan-Southeast Asian Islamic caliphate encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Mindanao region.
Last month an alleged Abu Sayyaf bomb-maker and logistics officer was arrested on the southern island of Jolo, shortly after a senior Abu Sayyaf leader, Albader Parad, was killed in a clash with security forces.
In an attack on Thursday four soldiers were injured when a home-made bomb exploded as they were hunting Abu Sayyaf extremists in the southern island of Basilan, said military spokeswoman First Lieutenant Steffani Cacho.
Police last month expressed concern about the increasing threat posed by roadside bombs in the south.
"We are implementing force-protection measures for our troops, and also cross-training with our US and other counterparts," Mapagu said, referring to about 600 US Special Forces advisers providing counter-terrorism training to Philippine forces in Mindanao.
"We are equipping them with armoured vests during operations, and of course raising the level of awareness not only for our soldiers but also civilians about the threat," the general said.
"We encourage them to be vigilant at all times. We need to make our communities inhospitable to terrorists so they will not succeed in their plots."
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