Khalifa’s death a big blow to weakened Abus

ZAMBOANGA CITY — The death of Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa is a big blow to the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group’s finance operations in the Philippines, a senior police intelligence official said yesterday.

Khalifa, tagged by military and police authorities as a financier of southern secessionist groups — including the Abu Sayyaf — using various firms as fronts, was killed Wednesday while on a business trip in Madagascar.

"His death will definitely cut the financial channel to the Abu Sayyaf group," said the official, who asked not to be named.

Khalifa, who was married to a Filipina from Zamboanga, operated several foundations and maintained offices both in Central Mindanao and in Zamboanga in the 1970s and 1980s.

The intelligence officer, who holds a position in the joint RP-US counterterrorism operation, said Khalifa set up the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) to extend relief to depressed Muslim areas by building a madrasa and mosques in Basilan, a former bastion of the Abu Sayyaf.

He was reportedly monitored to have tapped an Abu Sayyaf intelligence leader as his provincial director.

The source said the US government learned, through its anti-money laundering group, that the IIRO was allegedly used to launder money and channel funds to militant groups operating in the Philippines.

"It was really seen in public working on relief operations. However, the clandestine operation was unearthed when a former Abu Sayyaf member, with knowledge of the ins and outs of the IIRO’s Philippine-based operation, yielded (information that said) otherwise," the intelligence officer said.

The intelligence officer said documents show that the IIRO was a legitimate non-government organization that fell into the wrong hands, serving as the Abu Sayyaf’s link with other Islamic extremists during the early 1990s.

Khalifa established the IIRO in late 1980. He then established branches in Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, and in the cities of Cotabato and Zamboanga. The IIRO had its main office in Makati City.

At the same time that Khalifa established the IIRO, the late Ustadz Abdujarak Abubakar Janjalani founded the Al-Harakatul Al-Islamiya, better known as the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan, according to the source.

The intelligence officer said the bulk of the funding from the IIRO went to Abu Sayyaf operations, while the scant remainder went to legitimate projects.

He said it was during this time that the Abu Sayyaf, then led by Janjalani, concentrated mostly on attacks and bombings.

The source noted that the bandit group shifted to kidnapping for ransom in the mid-1990s, after Khalifa fled the country in 1994 as American and Philippine authorities uncovered plots by the al-Qaeda to stage deadly attacks.

The IIRO was closed down and banned from operating in the Philippines after US and Philippine authorities found that this organization laundered money to fund terrorist operations, the official said.

He was arrested that same year in the US on a visa violation in San Francisco after he was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. But he was deported to Jordan without standing trial.

In Jordan, Khalifa was tried on terrorism charges but was subsequently acquitted.

Khalifa, who had wanted to come back to the Philippines, denied all the allegations in various media interviews.

Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) public information office chief Lt. Col. Bartolome Bacarro said Khalifa’s death meant the loss of logistic support for the Abu Sayyaf, whose remnants are being pursued by government troops in the Sulu archipelago.

Abu Sayyaf chieftain Khadaffy Janjalani, who succeeded his older brother Abdujarak, had allegedly disclosed that Khalifa’s IIRO and the Benevolence International Corp., which the latter also set up, gave financial support to the Abu Sayyaf. The younger Janjalani was killed in an encounter with government troops last September.

Janjalani had denied links with the al-Qaeda but admitted that his group received P6 million from Khalifa and Ramzi Yousuf in exchange for sending volunteers to Afghanistan. Khalifa denied Janjalani’s claim.

The AFP is also looking into other organizations that could be providing financial and logistic support to the Abu Sayyaf, Bacarro said, but refused to divulge the identities of those running these organizations and if they are being operated in the Philippines or abroad.

"We believe that for an organization like the Abu Sayyaf to carry out its activities, they need a lifeline and that is financial support, and we have been informed that some organizations are doing that," he said.

Bacarro said the deaths of the younger Janjalani and Abu Sayyaf spokesman Abu Solaiman, which led to the cutoff of financial support to the bandit group, are advantageous to the AFP’s campaign against terrorism.

Questionable death

Khalifa, a jewel trader, "was killed in cold blood while sleeping in his room, which was raided by an armed gang of 25 to 30 people," his brother Malek Khalifa told Dubai-based television Al-Arabiya, which is Saudi-owned.

The assailants stole all of Khalifa’s belongings, the brother said.

Al-Arabiya quoted unspecified sources as saying the gunmen stormed a precious-stones mine owned by Khalifa at dawn Wednesday and killed him, making off with documents and other possessions.

Malek insisted that his brother had no links with bin Laden despite being a brother-in-law of the Saudi-born terror chief, who has been disowned by his family.

In an interview aired over CNN in 2004, Khalifa said he parted company with bin Laden in the late 1980s when he disagreed with the latter’s plan of a worldwide jihad.

Khalifa also denied links with Yousuf, who was meted a life sentence in 1997 for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.

Khalifa was a former best friend of bin Laden. They were close as students in Jeddah in the 1970s and were involved in the jihad opposing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Khalifa, who was married to bin Laden’s sister, claimed he last saw the terror chief on a family visit to Sudan in 1992.

CNN’s Nic Robertson said there are questions surrounding Khalifa’s death.

"Was he killed by bin Laden’s associates for speaking out against the al-Qaeda leader or... by an international intelligence agency settling an old score?" Robertson said.

Khalifa had been more vocal in his criticism of bin Laden in the past few years. In 2003, he sent an open letter to a Saudi newspaper, asking his brother-in-law to stop the terrorist acts being committed in his name. — With James Mananghaya, Paolo Romero AFP, AP