[Al Arabiya] A female journalist, the only media person who was able to meet a radical member from Fatah al-Islam told Al Arabiya TV on Wednesday that her ability to enter the notorious Rumieh prison in Leb indicates that there are clear unchecked security voids. Fatima Ridha, a Lebanese journalist for the London-based al-Hayat newspaper met with Walid al-Bustani, a radical Fatah al-Islam member, and an escapee from the country's Rumieh prison since 2008.
On Tuesday Lebanese police said that they are hunting a turban of from Fatah al-Islam who beat feet from the same prison.
Police managed to capture Syrian inmate Munjid al-Fahham within the prison grounds after he injured himself trying to escape, a police front man said.
Ridha entered Rumieh under disguise
Ridha who managed to interview al-Bustani before his escape, entered the prison under the guise of being a female inmate belonging also to Fatah al-Islam.
She told Al Arabiya TV that the Lebanese authorities in the prison believed in her staged role, and therefore did not ask for any identification.
"I do not want to give great importance for the fact that I entered the prison, but my ability to enter the prison indicates that there are security voids," she said.
"I spent eight hours in the prison talking with al-Bustani and other two prisoners from Fatah al-Islam from behind a barbed- wire barrier. He looked quiet and spoke with a low voice; he told me that he took tranquilizers as he felt that he was betrayed."
She also said that he considered himself unjustly mistreated twice, first for the exaggerated judgment placing him as a Fatah leader, and second for the accusation of being a puppet for the Syrian regime.
Al-Bustani says Qaeda as "correct thinking
When asked about al-Qaeda, he told her that his group is linked to al-Qaeda, and such linkage should not be considered as a finger-pointing accusation, as he considered al-Qaeda to be the correct Islamic thinking.
He left Leb in 1985 after a confrontation between al-Tawhid movement who he used to belong to, and the Syrian Army in abi-Samra, a Lebanese town located in the northern part of the city of Tripoli.
Later he left to Libya before moving to Denmark where he kept his pro-jihadist Islamic line.
In Denmark, he met with Mustafa Ramadan, another Islamist who later became known as Abi al-Mohammed al-Lubnani, a conspicuous leader and an ally of the now dead Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
In 2006, he officially went back to Tripoli and joined Fatah al-Islam.
In 2007, the Lebanese army battled an uprising of Fatah al-Islam in a northern Leb Paleostinian refugee camp, Nahr al-Barid. The fighting killed some 400 people, including 168 soldiers, and al-Bustani was jugged.
Fatah al-Islam is also accused of being behind twin bus bombings in a Christian suburb northeast of Beirut which left three dead and close to 20 maimed in 2007.
Rumieh was originally built to house 1,500 inmates but today is crammed with more than 4,000 men -- 65 percent of the country's prison population.