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| Southeast Asia |
| MILF received foreign arms funding |
| 2003-03-13 |
| MUSLIM rebels blamed for a deadly bomb attack in the southern Philippines last week have been buying arms using foreign funds, the military charged Thursday. It said documents recovered from a fallen enclave of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) last month revealed the rebels had made payments for machine guns, explosives, grenades and other battle hardware. The documents, declassified Thursday, comprised an arms purchase agreement in 1999 and invoices totaling nearly two million dollars for the weapons, military spokesman Colonel Essel Soriano said. The documents were signed by MILF political adviser Ghazali Jaafar and an alleged North Korean arms dealer named Rim Kyu Do with a Malaysian as witness, he said. Nice to have it in writing. The MILF signed a ceasefire agreement with the authorities in 2001 but the pact was shattered last month when the military launched a major offensive that led to the capture of their stronghold, Buliok complex, in the country's south. Soriano said the documents were found in a two-storey building that had served as MILF leader Hashim Salamat's headquarters in the complex. If I was running a terror group, the first thing I'd buy was a good shredder. That and a program to wipe my hard drives. It was not clear from where the MILF received money to acquire the weapons but Soriano said the discovery of the documents proved the MILF had long prepared for an "all-out war" with the government. He said the MILF had funneled several millions for their procurement of military hardware, "possibly through the discreet local and foreign funding," Soriano said without elaborating. Western intelligence agencies have in the past linked the MILF to the Jemaah Islamiyah. The MILF was also linked to a December bombing of a railway station in Manila that killed over a dozen people in 2000, a year after the rebels made the alleged arms purchase, officials said. |
| Posted by:Steve |