‘Americans feel safer here in RP’

Americans are safer from terrorist threats in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world, a US military officer said yesterday.

"We feel very safe and very encouraged (with) the result of this coordinated, synchronized effort by the government of the Philippines," said reserve US Navy Capt. Dennis Williams, the US Pacific Command’s public affairs chief in Manila and liaison officer to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

"The result of this coordinated, synchronized effort by the government of the Philippines, by the military and law enforcement agencies ... reflects the type of coordination, synchronization, intelligence fusion to get results and certainly, certainly we feel good about that."

Williams said the threat of terrorism is present in countries around the world, and that it’s everybody’s concern to be prepared for it.

"The threat of terrorism is there in any country, and everyone has to be best prepared to deal with that sort of a threat and conduct," he said.

In Washington, the State Department does not think that the Philippines and other close allies of the United States in the war on terror are being singled out for attacks by terrorist groups.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said terrorists are willing to strike at anybody.

"Some of them are close allies, some of them are other countries, some of them are Muslim countries, some of them are Arab countries," he told a news conference on Tuesday.

"What we’ve seen from various terrorist groups, in particular from al-Qaeda, is the indiscriminate use of violence against innocents in whatever society they might live in.

"And I’m afraid that’s the pattern that’s been established for the last several years, if you look at all the different places. I’m not sure there’s any change in that pattern at this point."

He made the comment when asked if following the bombings in Spain, he now thought that some of America’s closest allies in the war on terror — the Philippines, Britain and Uzbekistan — were being singled out for targeting.

Asked if terror plots foiled in Britain and the Philippines were part of terrorist plans for simultaneous attacks worldwide, Boucher said, "I’d better check on that and see what the experts say. I don’t want to just jump to a conclusion."

Philippine authorities on Tuesday said they had foiled a Madrid-type terrorist plot to bomb malls and trains in Metro Manila with the arrest of four suspected Abu Sayyaf rebels and the seizure of 80 pounds of explosives.

On the same day in one of the biggest anti-terror operations, police in London arrested eight men and seized more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, similar to that used in the October 2002 Bali terrorist bombings that killed 202 people.

And in Uzbekistan, police stormed a suspected Islamic militants’ hideout in a Tashkent suburb on Tuesday, killing 23 people, a day after explosions said to have been triggered by Islamic militants killed 19 civilians in the former Soviet Central Asian republic.

On March 11 terrorist train bombings in Madrid killed almost 200 people. — With Jose Katigbak in Washington