Police captured a Bangladeshi who had allegedly supplied the bombs and anti-tank rockets that rogue Moro Islamic Liberation Front bands used in attacking dozens of barangays in Cotabato province four months ago.
Muhammad Alpariz was arrested in his shop in Barangay Tapayan, Datu Mastura town in Shariff Kabunsuan province on Tuesday on the strength of a warrant of arrest issued by Judge Isaac Robillo of Davao City Regional Trial Court Branch 13.
Police seized from the suspected member of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group two improvised explosive devices, rigged mortar shells, two 81 mm mortar shells ready to be rigged, electrical wires, one 1.5 volt dry cell battery, an alarm clock, a cellular phone, a computer set, two mortar boosters, two non-electrical blasting caps and detonating cords.
Alpariz was taken to the Davao Region police headquarters for tactical interrogation and debriefing.
Chief Superintendent Andres Caro II, Directorate for Integrated Police Operations-Eastern Mindanao commander, said immigration documents seized from Alpariz showed that he is a Bangladeshi.
Upon his arrest, he told police that he was a Pakistani.
However, police checked with the Pakistan and Bangladesh embassies in Metro Manila and they were able to confirm that he is a Bangladeshi.
Senior Superintendent Danny Bacas, Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao police operations chief, said Alpariz lived secretly in Sultan Mastura near the MILF’s central headquarters in Sultan Kudarat town in Shariff Kabunsuan.
Army intelligence sources confirmed that Alpariz has links with the rogue MILF band under Ameril Umbra Kato.
It was Alpariz and his JI cohorts that provided Umbra and his men the technology to make improvised explosive devices from mortar rounds or anti-tank rockets, the sources added.
Military and police intelligence agents are hot on the trail of Alpariz’s alleged co-conspirators in various parts of South-Central Mindanao and the ARMM.
Government security men have arrested more than a dozen suspicious foreigners in central Mindanao in the past three years.
Last year, an Egyptian was nabbed in a residential district in Cotabato City and police found in his apartment materials used to manufacture homemade bombs. – Edith Regalado, John Unson, Ramil Bajo, Cecille Suerte Felipe