BY ASHZEL HACHERO

AN international terror and security expert yesterday cast doubt on the PNP’s finding that a mixture of methane gas and diesel vapor caused the explosion at the Glorietta 2 mall in Makati last October.

"It’s unconvincing in the way it is presented. I’m not saying that the PNP is fundamentally wrong, it’s just that they they’re not making their case in an effective way," Kit Collier told a forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines in Makati.

The Australia-based Collier is a visiting fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University and a security consultant of the International Crisis Group, an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization.

He is author of several reports for the ICG on the Philippines focusing on the relationship between domestic insurgency and transnational terrorism and is a frequent media commentator on security issues.

His doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii focused on the communist insurgency in Mindanao where he was based in 1986 and 1987 and from 1990 to 1992.

Collier cited the PNP’s presentation of photographs of two victims, one of a bomb explosion and the other one of a gas explosion.

"I’ve seen many victims of explosions. Injuries of blast victims are different. You just cannot say in pictures what kind of explosions have hit them," Collier explained, adding that not all bombs have similar components.

Collier said he was not pronouncing that the October 19 blast that killed 11 persons was a terrorist attack "although the public thinks it is so."

He said people tend to think government was covering up a terrorist attack because the PNP has not been consistent in its announcements.

In the first days of the post-blast investigation, PNP officials declared the explosion could have been caused by an LPG tank, only to tell the media later that it could have been a bomb and finally, the industrial accident theory.

"The PNP tends to come up with definitive statements which it will soon retract," Collier said.

"What’s very damaging in this case is the pattern of confused messages of the government. It has a destabilizing effect. As long as the government sends out these confused signals, the environment is rife for perceptions of conspiracy theory," Collier added.

A police team of bomb experts who initially examined the mall’s blast site reported the discovery of residues of RDX, a bomb component. However, the police said the recovery cannot be used to conclude that a bomb caused the explosion at the mall.

Collier said results of the investigations of both the PNP and Ayala Land Inc. should be made public to enable independent forensic and counter-terrorism specialists to scrutinize what evidence they have to support their conclusions.

Ayala Land, which owns the Glorietta malls, is disputing the gas explosion finding based on what it said were investigations conducted by experts it has hired.

"What’s alarming in this case is that more people believe that this is a terrorist attack. This is so because those reports, in its fullest forms, have not been made available yet so experts in this case can independently look at it," Collier said.

He noted similarities between the Glorietta and the SuperFerry 14 bombing in February 2004. In both incidents, he said police gave definitive announcements which they later contradicted.

Authorities had stuck to the accident theory for months until they said the ferry attack, which killed 116 people, was perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf.

Collier has taught Security Studies, Asian Studies and Political Science at the Australian National University and the University of Hawaii.

He was previously a fellow at the East West Center, Honolulu and head of research (Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) at Amnesty International London.

He said he has advised a range of government agencies on counter-terrorism, border security and development issues in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.