Bail for 2 ‘al-Qaeda men’ OK’d

COTABATO CITY — A General Santos City court has allowed two suspected Filipino members of the al-Qaeda international terrorist network, who yielded a ton of explosives and 19 M-16 assault rifles during a raid on their hideout early this month, to post P200,000 bail each.

The Mindanao Cross, a Catholic newspaper, reported yesterday that the suspects, Mohammad Al-Moqtar and Maulidin Malagat, may soon be free if they can raise the amount.

The two are known contacts of Indonesian national Fathur Al-Ghouzi, also a suspected al-Qaeda member who was nabbed in Manila a few days after the raid in General Santos City.

Joint operatives of the police, the military and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency seized from Al-Moqtar and Malagat at least 500 boxes of TNT, digital blasting devices, detonator cords, communications equipment and 19 M-16 assault rifles, neatly piled in one of the rooms of their hideout which, reports said, was just beside a mosque.

Al-Ghouzi, military intelligence sources said, underwent guerrilla training at Camp Abubakar, the former bastion of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, in the late 1990s.

MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu, however, belied this. "We don’t know him and he is not among those listed in the roster of MILF guerrillas who (underwent training) at Camp Abubakar. This is another attempt to project the MILF as a terrorist organization," he said.

Dozens of members of Indo—nesia’s Free Aceh Movement were reported to have trained, between 1990 and 2000, at Camp Abubakar, which the military overran on July 9, 2000.

In the past, the MILF had admitted that it received assistance for the construction of school buildings and other religious activities from Middle Eastern entities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which was suspected of having ties with Osama bin Laden.