The Philippine army has said it may have killed Indonesian militant Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi on the southern island of Mindanao at the weekend but it would have to wait for the results of forensic tests to be certain.
"Whaddya think, Narciso? Is this his lip?"
"We'll have to send it in for test..." |
Major-General Generoso Senga, commander of the Sixth Infantry Division, said the national police crime laboratory had been asked to see whether the body's fingerprints and teeth matched records for al-Ghozi, who escaped from a Manila jail in mid-July. "We suspect it's al-Ghozi but we have to check," Senga told a radio station on Mindanao. "Al-Ghozi has fingerprints and dental records with the PNP (national police), so it's easy to check."
| While we're waiting, I'll oil up the old uluator... |
The member of the Islamic militant network Jemaah Islamiah is accused of masterminding bombings in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 people. Intelligence agencies suspect his hand in planned and actual attacks elsewhere in the region. A local reporter, who was stopped from entering a military hospital at the Sixth Infantry base last night, told Reuters that people who had seen the body believed it was al-Ghozi. The reporter said army sources had told him that soldiers returned to the base at Awang with the body after staging a lightning operation yesterday. He said there was an unusually large presence of military intelligence officers at the base, just south of the city of Cotabato and that the security level was higher than normal. The army had said on Friday it was getting closer to recapturing the Indonesian militant.
| But did we believe them? No-o-o-o-o!... But then, they had him safely in jug, didn't they? We believed that. Gloria believed that. And what happened? |
Al-Ghozi was arrested by Philippine police in January 2002 and jailed later that year for possessing explosives and falsifying documents. He strolled out of his cell at the heavily guarded national police headquarters on July 14. "There is indeed a body that looks like him but we don't know if he's the one," Norberto Gonzales, the secretary for special concerns, told foreign journalists today.
| "You know, all these Southeast Asians look alike. Hell, we can't tell each other apart..." |
Manila, a strong ally of Washington, gets US military aid and training for its soldiers. But the ease with which al-Ghozi escaped embarrassed the government and cast doubt on Philippine reliability in the US-led war on terror.
| Did I go so far as to refer to them as paragons of ineptitude? I musta forgot... |
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