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2 senior al-Qaeda leaders may be trying to enter the Philippines
Just taking a look at the latest crop of storm troopers, dumb muscle, and cannon fodder or something nastier?Immigration officials in major airports and subports nationwide were placed on alert after the Bureau of Immigration received an intelligence report that two Egyptian members of al-Qaeda have arrived to sow terror in the country. Immigration Commissioner Alipio Fernandez Jr. ordered two weeks ago that Muhsin Musa Mutawalli Atwah, a.k.a. Abd Al-Rahman Al-Muhajir, and Muhammad Rabia Abd Al-Halim Shuwayb, a.k.a. Hamza Al-Rabi, be included on the watch-list of foreign terrorists. Their inclusion was requested by the intelligence community, which wanted the duo arrested and taken into custody should they enter the country. "Placing foreigners deemed as threats to national security on our watch list is a standard operating procedure of our campaign against terrorism," said the lawyer Faisal Hussin, the bureau's intelligence chief. Hussin said the two Egyptians were the latest among thousands of foreigners placed in the bureau's watch-list. Intelligence sources identified Muhajir as a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, leader of the international terror group al-Qaeda. Muhajir serves as a senior explosives expert of al-Qaeda and allegedly serves as consultant on almost every bombing attack blamed on the terror group. Muhajir's association with bin Laden reportedly dates back to the mid-1990s when latter lived in Sudan. He is said to have trained the militia that fought and attacked American peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993 and allegedly made the car bombs that went off at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. Al-Rabi, on the other hand, was identified as a former member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and currently a member of al-Qaeda's military committee as the organization's deputy chief for external operations. As the successor to Khalid Shaihk Muhammad who was captured in Pakistan in early 2003, Al-Rabi is allegedly involved in establishing al-Qaeda cells in many countries and supervised the training of the group's operatives including those behind last year's bombings in Uzbekistan. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-04-23 |
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