ZAMBOANGA CITY (Mindanao Examiner / 11 May) – The Philippine military on Friday said it has in custody four children of Jemaah Islamiya bomber Dulmatin, tagged as behind the deadly Bali bombing in 2002.
Filipino soldiers tracked down the children in the southern island of Tawi-Tawi near the Sabah border. “We have in custody the four children of Dulmatin,” a regional army spokesman Maj. Eugene Batara told the independent regional newspaper, the Mindanao Examiner.
He did not say whether more people had been arrested or if the children or their guardians were planning to escape to Sabah.
The children were previously thought to be hiding with the Abu Sayyaf in Jolo island, where Dulmatin’s wife, Istiada Bt. H. Oemar Sovie, alias Amenah Toha, and her two children had been arrested in October last year.
It was unknown how the soldiers tracked down the children.
Dulmatin, also known as Amar Bin Usman, is one of several Indonesian terrorists, including Umar Patek, hiding in Jolo island with the Abu Sayyaf. Dulmatin and Patek are wanted for the October 2002 bombings in the resort Indonesian island of Bali in which 202 mostly foreign tourists were killed.
The Jemaah Islamiya is also believed as behind the 2004 bombing of a Filipino ferry off Manila Bay that killed 116 people-the second-worst terrorist attack in Southeast Asia after the 2002 Bali bombs.
The group was largely blamed by Philippine authorities in a series of bombings in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 and wounded more than 100 people. One of the bombs exploded at an open square less than a hundred meters from the U.S. Embassy.
The U.S. has offered a $10 million bounty for the capture of Dulmatin, an electronics specialist with training in al-Qa'eda camps in Afghanistan. He is a senior figure in the Jemaah Islamiya terrorist organization.
Dulmatin fled to Mindanao in the southern Philippines soon after the August 2003 bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta. There, he is one of four top JI leaders—including Umar Patek, Zulkifli bin Hir and Abdul Rahman Ayub — who trained members of JI and the Abu Sayyaf group in Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) camps in the Philippines, according to an Asian terror expert, Zachary Abusa.
In 2005, Dulmatin and Umar Patek ordered Abdullah Sonata, a JI operative in Central Java who was arrested in connection with the September 4, 2004 Australian Embassy bombing, to dispatch additional JI members to Mindanao for training.
He has also called for JI suicide bombers to be sent to the Philippines for operations.
In January, Filipino soldiers killed an Indonesian Jemaah Islamiya militant, Gufran, and five other Filipino Abu Sayyaf members in a clash at sea off Tawi-Tawi while trying to escape to Sabah. (Mindanao Examiner)
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