Janjalani aide grilled on blasts

Police have started questioning a ranking member of the Abu Sayyaf on reported terrorist threats to attack Metro Manila as well as Friday’s bus bomb attack in Quezon City that killed two people.

Authorities said Mark Bolkerin Gumbahale, 21, was a close aide of Abu Sayyaf leader Khaddafy Janjalani and spokesman Abu Sabaya. He is detained in an isolated, heavily guarded cell at Camp Crame in Quezon City.

"Gumbahale may have some information on the perpetrators of the Quezon City blast, but it is too early to link him to it," a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The STAR.

In an interview the other day, Gumbahale said he learned from close friends in Taguig, where he was arrested by military intelligence agents Thursday, that three Abu Sayyaf members arrived from Sulu on Oct. 12.

"There were at least three from Jolo who arrived," he said.

He claimed he had no other details because he had cut off communications with his comrades since he arrived in Manila two years ago to get away from a life constantly on the run from the military in the South.

That prompted the Southern Police District, whose jurisdiction includes Taguig, to keep a tight watch.

Police said Gumbahale has admitted during questioning his participation in the deadly Rizal Day bombings in 2000.

The Dec. 30, 2000 blasts – which hit a passenger train, a bus and some other targets – killed 22 people and left more than 100 others injured.

Criminal charges are being readied against Gumbahale, Chief Superintendent Jaime Caringal, police intelligence chief, said.

Gumbahale, according to police, said he helped plant the bomb on the passenger bus and the one on the LRT coach. His accomplice was killed when the bomb on bus exploded prematurely.

He also claimed that one Mouklis Yunos, allegedly the head of the special operations group of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was in charge of the Rizal Day bombings. He did not say if the MILF itself was involved.

US news reports, citing foreign intelligence sources, said the MILF had ties with al-Qaeda and even set up two al-Qaeda training camps in the mid-1990s in Mindanao. Up to a thousand Indonesians reportedly received training at the camps. The MILF denied the allegation.

Police suspect Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesia-based militant group and affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network, was behind the Rizal Day bombings and Friday’s bus attack in Quezon City.

Police are hunting down a man suspected of carrying out the bus attack, based on the description provided by one of the survivors.

Gumbahale’s information jibed with earlier police reports that terrorists, including al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiyah operatives, may be planning to stage bomb attacks in Metro Manila.

Meanwhile, military officials said yesterday Gumbahale was mistakenly identified as a leader of the Abu Sayyaf by President Arroyo.

Mrs. Arroyo on Saturday presented Gumbahale to the press and tagged the suspect as the notorious Abu Sayyaf leader known as Abu Pula or "Doctor Abu."

But military intelligence officials in the South, upon seeing the suspect’s picture, said Mrs. Arroyo apparently made a mistake and presented the wrong man.

Gumbahale was arrested last week in a raid on the Muslim enclave in Metro Manila’s Taguig district, but military intelligence officials in the Mindanao said the man presented was definitely much younger than the real Abu Pula.

Abu Pula is one of several senior Abu Sayyaf leaders on the island of Sulu, who planned and carried out a daring cross-border kidnapping raid on a Malaysian resort island in April 2000.

Dozens of mostly European hostages were seized in that operation, but later freed allegedly after ransom payments.

The Abu Sayyaf is now on the run from a military assault in Sulu and nearby Basilan island.

Mrs. Arroyo on Saturday said Gumbahale was the same Abu Pula, who has a P5-million bounty on his head.

"He is not the main man. He is not the notorious Abu Pula, whose real name is Umbra Jumdail," a senior intelligence official in Zambonga City said upon seeing Gumbahale’s picture.

"He is nothing, not even a sub-leader. Gumbahale may just be an ordinary Abu Sayyaf member. The real Dr. Abu Pula must be laughing now at the President and the police."

National police chief Director General Hermogenes Ebdane could not be reached for comment. — With Sheila Crisostomo, Katherine Adraneda, AFP