No suprises here, this has been going on for a decade
For the last six to nine months, recruits mostly from Indonesia and Malaysia, but also a few from as far off as Pakistan and the Middle East, have received training at inaccessible, rough-hewn sites â basically a few huts and some tents â in a marshy region on the island of Mindanao, officials said.
The training is similar to what their older colleagues in terrorism got in Afghanistan when that served as Al Qaeda's base, they added. In Mindanao, though, the training appears to include more of a special emphasis on the use of sophisticated explosives, the officials said. "We've closed the camps in Afghanistan, but they're still operating in the southern Philippines," said an Australian official in Canberra. More broadly, intelligence officials say there is a constant movement of international terrorists across an area that includes Mindanao, islands in the Sulu Sea, the Malaysian state of Sabah and northern Indonesia.
The training camps are in an area under the control of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been waging a guerrilla war for an independent state for 25 years, officials said. Hundreds of Qaeda recruits trained at Moro camps in the late 1990's, including some of the men being tried in the Bali bombing, Western officials said. But those camps were destroyed by the Philippine Army in 2000, and Moro rebels have steadfastly denied any links to Al Qaeda. A new round of training began at several sites six to nine months ago, officials said. Similarly, in recent months, Al Qaeda has reorganized bases of operation in a number of other places, including Kenya, Sudan and Chechnya, according to senior counterterrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East.
At the Moro camps, courses vary in length from two weeks to three months, instructors are Indonesians and Arabs as well as Filipinos, and graduates receive a certificate, a Philippine intelligence officer said. There are 30 to 40 students in a class, most of them Filipinos joining the Moro rebels, along with the foreigners sent by Jemaah Islamiyah, he said.
Posted by: Paul Moloney ||
05/31/2003 10:47:19 PM ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
PEORIA, Illinois â A Qatari native who is alleged to have run a credit card scam to help fund the Al-Qaeda terror network denied misleading FBI agents in federal court here Thursday and was ordered held without bond. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri pleaded not guilty to making false statements to FBI agents and five other counts relating to identity and credit card fraud and making false statements to banks. The 38-year-old was arrested in December 2001 after being repeatedly quizzed by FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. According to the indictment, Al-Marri lied to FBI agents when he said that he did not call a phone number used by Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, the alleged moneyman behind the Sept. 11 hijackings, several times in the fall of 2001. Prosecutors claim that Al-Marri also lied to the agents about when he was last in the United States. In interviews with the authorities, Al-Marri said that he had been outside the US for some 10 years, since he graduated from Peoriaâs Bradley University with a business degree in 1991. But authorities claim Al-Marri was in the United States in the summer of 2000, when he allegedly used fake names and social security numbers to open three bank accounts in Macomb, central Illinois and set up a dummy postal address for a ghost business âAAA Carpets.â For his part, Al-Marri said he returned to the United States on Sept. 10 â one day before the attacks on New York and Washington â to study for a masters degree in computer science at Bradley.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
05/31/2003 10:19:47 AM ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. â Sheriff's deputies arrested Eric Rudolph the fugitive charged with the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and in bomb attacks at a gay nightclub and an abortion clinic, the FBI said. Rudolph was digging in a trash bin in the small town of Murphy in the western North Carolina mountains early Saturday when he was stopped at about 4:30 a.m., said Special Agent John Iannarelli in Washington. He said the man appeared to be homeless, but the deputies believed he was Rudolph.
The two aren't exclusive, are they?
Authorities were doing fingerprint analysis on the man Saturday morning to determine if his prints matched Rudolph's, Iannarelli said. His identity has since been confirmed.
Bingo. He's maybe not in the ululating category, but it's nice to know he's nabbed...
A law enforcement source in North Carolina who has been tracking Rudolph for years said he had seen the man. "There's a number of things that have to be done ... confirmation of fingerprints, other things. We have a lot of work to do," the source said. Rudolph, a 36-year-old Army veteran and experienced outdoorsman, hasn't been seen since July 1998 after he allegedly stole supplies from a health store owner in North Carolina. His truck had been spotted there early that year. Authorities spent years searching the rural mountains and caves of North Carolina for any trace of Rudolph. They ran across some camping sites believed to be his and found cartons of oatmeal and raisins, jars of peanuts and vitamins, and cans of tuna they said were the same brands Rudolph ate.
The only two brands I can think of off the top of my head are Bumblebee and Starkist, so that's not really conclusive, unless he eats only Bob's of Maine Brand Tuna...
Rudolph is believed to adhere to Christian Identity, a white supremacist religion that is anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner and mostly illiterate. Some of the four bombs Rudolph was charged with planting included messages from the shadowy "Army of God." Authorities believe that on July 27, 1996, Rudolph placed a bomb hidden in a knapsack in Atlanta's crowded Centennial Olympic Park during the summer Olympic games. The explosion at the crowded park killed one woman and injured 111 other people. Rudolph was charged in 1998 with that bombing and three others — at a gay nightclub in Atlanta, an office building north of Atlanta and an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., where a police officer was killed. In all, the bombings killed two and wounded more than 150 people. Rudolph eluded a massive manhunt and remains on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. The FBI also had offered a $1 million reward for his capture.
Guess who's buying donuts this week?
Pockets of western North Carolina have had a reputation as a haven for right-wing extremists. Some there mocked the government's inability to find Rudolph with bloodhounds, infrared-equipped helicopters and space-age motion detectors — and some said they would hide him if asked.
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/31/2003 8:46:42 AM ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
