Manila says militants recruiting for suicide attacks

MANILA, Nov 14 (Reuters) Islamic militants from Indonesia are trying to mount suicide attacks in the Philippines using recruits from Sulawesi and Java, a police intelligence officer said today.

About half a dozen members of Jemaah Islamiah, which seeks to create an Islamic 'superstate' across Southeast Asia, are hiding on a remote southern Philippine island, where they are training members of homegrown militant group Abu Sayyaf.

The suspected JI militants, including a Singaporean, a Malaysian and four Indonesians, were looking for recruits in Indonesia after failing to drum up enthusiasm among local militants for suicide missions, the intelligence official said.

''We learned that they were also seeking recruits from Java and Sulawesi to carry out suicide bomb attacks in the Philippines because they could not find any volunteer among Filipino rebels,'' Romeo Ricardo, the head of the anti-terrorism task force said.

The Philippines has been battling Muslim and communist insurgencies for decades but has never had a suicide bomber. The country's worst terror attack was the bombing of a ferry in 2004 that killed more than 100 people. Abu Sayyaf was blamed.

Last year, about two dozen Indonesians were recruited, but only four had gone to an Abu Sayyaf camp in the southern Philippines for bomb-making training. The rest were caught by Indonesian and Malaysian authorities while crossing the borders.

''The last time we heard, some of these recruits had returned home to Indonesia,'' Ricardo said, adding two may have stayed with Dulmatin and Umar Patek, JI militants and the top two suspects in the 2002 Bali suicide bombings that killed 202 people.

Since August, about 6,000 Philippine troops, backed by US military advisors, have been trying to flush out hundreds of Abu Sayyaf and a handful of JI members, including Dulmatin and Umar Patek, who have been hiding in the Philippines for over 3 years.

REUTERS MS PM1603