ELITE government troops on Wednesday preempted "big" plans
for terror attacks by overrunning a camp of the Abu Sayyaf Group and the
Southeast Asian regional terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah at the outskirts of
Indanan, Sulu, Brig. Gen. Juancho Sabban, commander of the military's Joint Task
Force Comet, said.
Sabban said in a phone interview that the task force began
firing artillery rounds at the camp of some 200 ASG and JI terrorists in the
village of Marang in the wee hours of Wednesday while elite Marines and Army
soldiers moved to assault the lair. He said they surmised that the terrorists
were up to something big due to the "convergence of their leaders (in the area
which) is unusual. "We launched a surgical attack on the camp of the Abu Sayyaf
and JI; this is their main camp in Indanan, based on the information that we got
that Radulan Sahiron, Omar Patek, about 200 of them are there. I think they are
planning to do something big so we launched a preemptive strike using our
artillery and ground forces."
Sahiron is one of the top remaining leaders of the Abu Sayyaf.
Patek is one of the JI leaders said to be operating in the country and carries a
$1 million bounty on his head offered by the US government.
Sabban said the ASG and JI terrorists got some help from an
undetermined number of Moro National Liberation Front fighters during the ground
assault but the latter group withdrew after getting a warning from the military.
He said at least 300 commandos from the Marines Force Recon,
First Scout Ranger Regiment and Light Reaction Company captured the camp at
around 7 a.m. He said the military sustained no casualties while the enemy
suffered heavy losses.
Sabban said the troops found a bomb-making facility at the
camp with improvised explosives made from 81 mm mortars. He said the recovered
explosives were the same type of bombs used in bombings in Zamboanga City and
other areas.
He said fighters from the MNLF, which signed a peace accord
with the government in 1996, fired mortars at the soldiers' position, prompting
the military to warn them off. "Some fires were coming from their (MNLF) camp.
We told them to stop or else we will retaliate by firing at their camp and they
stopped," he said.
"They went back inside their camp because we told them we
will not hit your camp because our target is the camp of the Abu Sayyaf and we
respect the provisions of the peace agreement. The agreement between the MNLF
and the Armed Forces was that they will withdraw and confine themselves inside
their camp while we search the camp and then we will go back to our camp,"
Sabban added.
Sabban said the MNLF is aware of the bombs being assembled in the ASG-JI
camp. He said the MNLF fighters also know that their camp, which is far from
that of the terrorists', was not the object of the assault. - Victor Reyes
