Word: selamah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Until the morning last November when Philippine troops backed by armored vehicles sealed off the recitation center and orphanage under cover of predawn darkness. Shortly after 5:30 a.m. an antiterrorist task force burst into the school to seize a shaken, protesting Selamah. (According to military sources, they also found passports of at least five different nationalities, at least one firearm and documents on explosives and bombmaking.) Three hours later in Manila, two apartments were raided, yielding firearms, explosives, time fuses, manuals on explosives, sketches of targets and two other non-Filipinos: Masrie, a 32-year-old Palestinian born...
...arrest of the three men in November raises lots of questions. Was it to pre-empt a planned terror wave in the Philippines? How far beyond the three arrested does the cell extend? What exactly was Selamah's role in the cell? Philippine officials won't specifically say. But some analysts believe Selamah acted as an al-Qaeda recruiter and facilitated the movement of operatives in and out of the Philippines via the country's maritime "back-door" border with Malaysia and Indonesia...
...Selamah arrived in the Philippines in or around 1992. Philippine intelligence sources believe him to have been a close associate of Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, brother-in-law and Philippines point man of Osama bin Laden. A veteran of the Afghan jihad, Khalifa is believed to have first visited the southern Philippines in 1988, setting up Islamic charities and a rattan business while recruiting Muslim youth to fight in Afghanistan. In Cotabato, his Islamic Relief Organization (IRO) opened offices in town opposite the bishop's residence. Embarrassingly for the MILF?which has angrily denied links with international terror?Khalifa's associate...
...Both of Selamah's alleged colleagues in terror are also longtime residents with local wives and children. Masrie came to the Philippines in 1990 to study computer programming. In late 1994 he married. By then, according to Philippine intelligence reports, he had linked up with Ramzi Yousef who was in the Philippines between late 1994 and January 1995 training Abu Sayyaf on Basilan and later hatching the Bojinka Plot. That plot got busted on Jan. 6, 1995, when a chemical fire broke out in one of the bombmakers' apartments. Yousef fled Manila but was eventually picked up in Pakistan...
...Intelligence sources in Manila believe that Selamah was already in the al-Qaeda cell at the time of the Bojinka Plot, and has apparently become Khalifa's successor as al-Qaeda's point man in the insurgency-wracked south. Intelligence analysts tell TIME that while al-Qaeda assisted in the training of Abu Sayyaf in the mid-90s, bin Laden's network was closely monitoring the MILF as a larger and better organized vehicle for Islamic revolution. In the second half of the '90s the MILF, under the leadership of its chairman Hashim Salamat, was also developing its own contacts...