Posted on 04/01/2002 7:15:07 PM PST by repubmom
(NOTE: Basilan Provincial Information Officer, Christopher Puno was present in the ward at Basilan Community Hospital when I interviewed Elmina Abdul, less than two weeks prior to her death.)
ISABELA CITY, Basilan – Elmina Abdul, widow of one of the Abu Sayyaf co-founders, Edwin Angeles, died in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, March 30. Ten days before she died, she talked with this writer in confidence while lying on her deathbed at Basilan Community Hospital. I was the last, if not the only reporter, to ever talk with her.
Elmina was Edwin’s fourth and last wife. She met him in 1995 while he was in the Basilan Provincial Jail. They were married in 1997, almost a year before Angeles was summarily executed in Basilan in 1998. What she told me at that final interview was at once revealing and shocking. Edwin had told Elmina the entire chronicle of his experience as a co-founder of the ASG and a deep-cover agent of the Department of National Defense, beginning in 1991. Edwin told her that he expected to be killed soon and he was.
Among the most interesting revelations that Angeles shared with Elmina was about a meeting between himself, Ramsey Yousef, Abdul Murad (both of whom are now serving multiple prison terms for terrorist activities, including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993), Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, unidentified members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and two men who Angeles only identified as Iraqis. The meeting, according to Elmina, was held in a warehouse near a Dole (Phil.) plant in South Cotabato, between General Santos City and Davao del Sur. There were two other men at that meeting: a man who Angeles identified as Nichols and as ‘code name Farmer,’ and another American who he did not identify by name.
(It is important to note that most Filipinos commonly describe Caucasians in the country as Americans.)
The meeting, according to Elmina took place in 1994. She could not remember the exact date.
In that meeting, according to Elmina, Angeles told her that the major topic of the discussion was the bombing of specified targets and how to build bombs. Angeles told Elmina that Nichols was later sent to a place that he (Angeles) didn’t name for more detailed instruction on how Nichols and his other ‘American’ friend could build a bomb to destroy a building in the United States. She did not specify — she could not remember — which building that was to be.
Elmina also told me that before he was gunned down, Edwin showed her documents that proved that he actually was a deep-cover agent for the Department of National Defense. He said that those documents were presented in court in his defense and that was the reason that he was acquitted of the charges against him. That is a matter of record. But since I have never seen the documents, I will not name the ‘high ranking’ Defense officials whose signatures were said to appear on those documents.
Angeles also told Elmina about Project Bojenko, an Iraqi-financed operation of terror that targeted several buildings in the US, the bombing of several US airliners, bombing US embassies overseas, and hitting other US interests. Among the buildings in the US, according to Elmina, were another attack on the World Trade Center; the Federal Buildings in San Francisco, and in “a place he called Uklahuma (Oklahoma).
When I asked Elmina why she thought that Angeles was killed, she only told me: “The traitors killed him. They used him, then they killed him.”
I asked her if she meant the Defense officials who recruited him as a deep cover agent, tears fell from her eyes. She waved her hand, indicating that she didn’t want to talk any more. She was weak. I nodded, stroked her head and left Elmina Abdul to rest. That was the last time that I saw her alive.
Was there an international conspiracy of terror forged in a meeting in an abandoned warehouse in 1994 that included Angeles and Nichols, who he referred to as ‘the Farmer?’ Did that conspiracy include members of Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government (or at least Iraqis)? Does the ASG actually receive financial and material assistance from Al-Qaeda and Iraq in order to carry on its campaign of terror? Elmina did not give precise, clear answers to those questions. She was relating what Angeles had told her not long before he died.
There is one thing clear: Edwin Angeles did meet with Nichols and another ‘American’ along with some state-sponsored international terrorists. Elmina knew that she was dying. She knew that all our efforts to help her recover would not be enough to save her. She told me what she knew to be the truth, as her husband told it to her.
At the beginning of the interview I asked Elmina why she was willing to talk to me after such a long silence. She told me: “I am going to die soon. I want to tell the truth about my husband so that people will know.”
Does traveling to the Philippines require a passport or visa?
To stay longer than 21 days in the country, you need to get additional visas which cost a bit of money. Therefore the book advises those planning to stay longer to get a visa in advance.
JQ: Anyway, getting to the subject at hand - the Oklahoma City bombing. The evidence that has been ignored regarding the Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City bombing, there was supposed to be a press conference today, it has been postponed indefinitely. What's going on?
DS: Well, the reason that the press conference has been postponed indefinitely is because the agent, Robert Wright, the FBI agent here in Chicago, cannot go public on everything until he has the final - it's not really approval, but it's, they have to check everything that he is about to say for any possible internal security, or something like that, classified information. They're not being overly goofy about this. They are, we anticipate the full approval any day. But I didn't want him to go forward and put his job on the line until we had that final approval. We've been dotting every I and crossing every T and this is just one more T to cross.
As anyone heard or read anything more about Robert Wright?
DS: Within the last week, we always thought that this John Doe #2 was kind of an operative working for somebody. Within the past week, I have learned from an extremely good source, in the Philippines, that McVeigh, Nichols, a representative of Abu Sayyaf and our John Doe #2 were all together in the Philippines before the bombing. It appears our John Doe #2 was a very important operative.
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