By Hader Glang
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines
Philippine security forces captured Tuesday a wanted member of an al-Qaeda-linked group in southern Basilan province – an Abu Sayyaf stronghold.
The police director of Zamboanga, a predominantly Christian city in the country’s majority Muslim south, told Anadolu Agency that fugitive Alkobar Indanan was arrested in a joint operation in Lantawan town at around 3 a.m. (2000GMT Monday).
Sr. Supt. Angelito Casimiro said Indanan had been involved in a 2001 mass kidnapping in Lantawan during which two hostages were beheaded and had “standing warrants of arrest for kidnapping and serious illegal detention, murders and frustrated murders.”
The arrest came in the wake of a weekend raid aimed at his capture that led to the capture of his cohort Salam Arula in an east coast village in Zamboanga City.
Arula was caught Saturday at his home, where security forces reportedly recovered bomb-making materials and explosives.
According to security officials, Alkobar belongs to a group under the leadership of Basilan-based Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon – who appeared in a July video posted on YouTube in which he and his men swear allegiance to Daesh and its leader, Abu Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Hapilon, who carries a U.S. bounty of $5 million on his head, was indicted in Washington for "terrorist acts against United States nationals and other foreign nationals." His role in the video had been confirmed in the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2014.
The report listed the Abu Sayyaf – alongside al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asia affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah and the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army -- as among the “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” operating in the Philippines.
It said the Abu Sayyaf Group is the "most violent of the groups operating in the Philippines "as it claims to promote an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago.”
Since 1991, the Abu Sayyaf -- armed with mostly improvised explosive devices, mortars and automatic rifles -- has carried out bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and extortion in a self-determined fight for an independent Islamic province in the Philippines.
It is notorious for beheading victims after ransoms have failed to be paid for their release.
