Bin Laden’s brod-in-law ran relief org near bishop’s compound in Cotabato

COTABATO CITY – Osama bin Laden’s slain brother-in-law ran a branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) near the Bishop’s Compound in Cotabato City from the late 1980s until 1992.

Jamal Khalifa, reputedly Bin Laden’s bagman and who allegedly financed the Abu Sayyaf and other extremist groups in Mindanao, supervised the operations of the IIRO in Central Mindanao from a rented building along Sinsuat Avenue in Cotabato City.

The building was in front of a compound housing the archbishop of Cotabato, who has jurisdiction over a diocese covering dozens of parishes in Central Mindanao, and in nearby Tacurong City and Sultan Kudarat province.

Khalifa was killed under mysterious circumstances on Wednesday while on a business trip to Madagascar.

Some local officials in what is now Shariff Kabunsuan province confessed to having met Khalifa during his travels to remote barangays in the area of Camp Abubakar, the former bastion of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, at the tri-boundaries of Buldon, Barira and Matanog towns, to extend "relief services" to impoverished communities.

"He was more of a Good Samaritan at that time," said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified.

"No one really knew he was a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who was to become the world’s number 1 terrorist."

Not one from those who had interfaced with Khalifa could explain why he set up an IIRO branch near the residence of then Archbishop of Cotabato Philip Smith, an American missionary of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) congregation.

Since the 1940s, the OMI has been operating various humanitarian projects, some funded by donors abroad, in poor Muslim and Christian communities in Central Mindanao and the islands of Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, now both component provinces of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Also located inside the Bishop’s Compound is the vaunted Notre Dame Educational Association (NDEA), which has more than 100 member-schools across Mindanao and also operates various pro-poor projects bankrolled by foreign funding organizations, including the Misereor, an organization of German Catholic church leaders that funds student development programs for deserving children.

Khalifa’s IIRO also provided scholarship grants, donated Arabic books, water pumps, food and used clothes to poor Maguindanaons in different towns in what was then the first district of Maguindanao, now part of Shariff Kabunsuan province.

Highly placed sources from the Muslim religious community have confirmed that Khalifa also helped certain "Iranian nationals" run a social welfare program for young Maguindanaon and Maranaw male orphans in the city and surrounding towns.

In the early, 1990s, police caught the Iranians smuggling garlic into the city, and nothing has been heard about them since.

Key sources from the government’s intelligence communities said Khalifa used the IIRO as a conduit for funds that he and Bin Laden channeled to the Abu Sayyaf and radical factions in Basilan, the Zamboanga Peninsula and the ARMM provinces of Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur.

The IIRO was closed down and banned from operating in the Philippines after US and Philippine authorities found that it laundered money to fund terrorist operations, sources said.

Khalifa was arrested on a visa violation offense in San Francisco after he was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.

He was deported to Jordan without standing trial.

In Jordan, Khalifa was tried on terrorism charges but was subsequently acquitted.

Khalifa, who had wanted to come back to the Philippines, denied all the allegations in various media interviews.

In 1992, when the IIRO was operating in Cotabato City, 40 missionaries were brought into the ARMM by then Consul Aly Tapozada of the Egyptian embassy in Manila.

Some of the preachers were deployed in Sulu, Tawi-Tawi and Lanao del Sur through the ARMM’s education department.

Fifteen years later, the ARMM’s education department could no longer ascertain the exact whereabouts of the 40 Egyptian missionaries.

Neither has it any record if the preachers have returned to Egypt or moved to other countries.