Posted on 03/06/2004 8:35:01 AM PST by knighthawk
Malaysia is holding in detention six Indonesians caught returning from a Jemaah Islamiah militant training camp in the southern Philippines, a senior security official told Reuters on Saturday.
Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a Southeast Asian offshoot of Al Qaeda, was behind the Bali bombings in late 2002 and the suicide bomb attack on the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta last year.
The security source said the six men were caught several weeks ago, but their arrest kept quiet.
"They were all Indonesians on their way home from the southern Philippines where they had been at a JI training camp," the source told Reuters.
They were discovered among a boat load of illegal immigrants arrested while trying to enter Malaysia's state of Sabah near Sandakan, a port on the northeast coast of Borneo, just across the Sulu Sea from the islands of the southern Philippines.
It is a favoured route for militants.
There is large flow of illegal migrants through Borneo as the island is shared between Indonesia, Malaysia and the tiny sultanate of Brunei, and the coastline and interior are hard to patrol.
The source said one of the men known as "Denny" was a trainer at a camp hosted by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the restive southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
Philippines intelligence officials wish to question "Denny" and he may be sent back, though for now all six men were being held in Kamunting detention camp in northern Malaysia, the source said.
Malaysia is holding some 72 Jemaah Islamiah suspects, and up to 18 members of a local group called Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM), under a security law allowing detention without trial.
Around 46 of the prisoners in Kamunting began a hunger strike last week to protest the conditions of their imprisonment.
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