Manila says Muslim rebels dismantle militant camps

MANILA, Apr 24 (Reuters) The Philippines believes the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the country's largest Muslim rebel group, has dismantled camps for foreign militants since 2004, when peace talks moved forward, a police official said today.

Senior Superintendent Romeo Ricardo, head of the national police anti-terrorism task force, said there were also signs that members of the regional network Jemaah Islamiah (JI) had been forced to work with the smaller homegrown group Abu Sayyaf.

Ricardo said intelligence officials believed one camp called Jabal Quba on the southern island of Mindanao no longer existed, adding that JI members staying there were forced to move by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

''There is no ongoing training at the moment,'' he told a forum with foreign journalists.

Ricardo said the MILF rebels appeared to be ''very sincere'' in cooperating with the government in isolating foreign militants, mostly Indonesians, Malaysians and a few Singaporeans.

Informal peace talks between the MILF and the government appear to be in the final stages to try to end a nearly 40-year separatist conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people and hampered development of the resource-rich but impoverished south.

The two sides are due to hold another round of talks, hosted by Malaysia, on ancestral rights for minority Muslims in the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines in the first week of May.

NO MORE LINKS On Friday, a Singapore-based security analyst said foreign militants continued to train at MILF bases deep in the mountains of Mindanao, disputing claims by the rebels that they had cut ties with al Qaeda and JI.

''The MILF has constantly lied that it is not harbouring JI,'' said Rohan Gunaratna, head of political violence and terrorism centre at Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.

Philippine police, citing intelligence reports, said about 40 suspected JI members remained in the south but there was no proof they were seeking refuge in MILF camps.

Ricardo said hundreds of foreign militants, including those from the Middle East, trained from 1994 until 2004 in camps set up by the MILF near its stronghold in central Mindanao.

Among suspected al Qaeda operatives who visited the camps were Dhiren Barot, an Indian-born Briton arrested in London in 2004 and French-Algerian Abdusalam Bolanoure, caught in Manila's airport in 1999, Ricardo said.

The Philippines says it has arrested nearly 250 foreign and homegrown militants since 2002, after the MILF agreed to help security forces isolate terrorist cells on Mindanao.

Among those arrested were four Indonesians, including the suspected head of Lashkar Jundullah, a group based in eastern Indonesia that has been involved in communal violence.

REUTERS CH KN1358