Malaysia rounds up terrorist suspects

KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysian police have arrested 12 men belonging to a new radical Indonesian group suspected of planning attacks on several neighboring countries, a news report said yesterday.

The Star newspaper said the 12 — at least two of them Malaysians — worked for the previously unknown group called Darul Islam, and described the arrests as Malaysian police’s biggest success against terrorism since the crackdown five years ago on Kampulan Militan Malaysia, or KMM, a homegrown Islamic extremist group.

At the time, scores of suspected members of KMM, which is aligned with the regional al-Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah, were arrested and jailed under a law that allows indefinite detention without trial.

The Star said the 12 suspected members of Darul Islam, most of whom are Indonesians, were captured recently after about six months of surveillance in Sabah state on Malaysia’s portion of Borneo Island, which it shares with Indonesia. A tiny portion of Borneo is also occupied by the sultanate of Brunei.

Police officials could not be immediately reached to confirm the Star report.

The Star quoted unidentified sources as saying that police seized several firearms and documents, including bomb-making instructions downloaded from the Internet from the 12 men. Eleven of them are being held at the high-security Kamunting detention center where terror suspects including those arrested in the 2001 crackdown are being kept.

Details of the group’s targets were not clear, The Star said.

One of the Malaysians arrested is a religious schoolteacher who graduated with a degree in Arabic literature from a Syrian university. The job of the 12 men was to organize lodging, transport and other logistical requirements for the group, The Star said.

It said police are investigating if Darul Islam has any links with the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the southern Philippines and the al-Qaeda terror network of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.<