Police have disrupted plots by Muslim militants to bomb tourist and shopping locations in the volatile southern Philippines with the arrests of seven suspects, officials said yesterday.
Police deputy director Avelino Razon identified those detained as operatives of the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group and the Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah who were suspected of plotting attacks to divert attention from an ongoing military offensive against militants on Basilan and Jolo islands.
The arrests included three suspected Abu Sayyaf bomb experts on southwestern Palawan island, a resort province and popular tourist destination northwest of Basilan and Jolo.
Some of the seven detained were armed with explosives.
Razon said the suspects told interrogators they had assembled four improvised explosive devices, one of which was recovered on Sunday near a mosque in Puerto Princesa, Palawan's provincial capital. The three other devices have not been found, he said.
One of those arrested, Omar Jakarain, also known as Abu Moguera, was wanted for his involvement in the 2001 kidnapping of American and other tourists from Palawan's Dos Palmas resort. That yearlong kidnapping saga left several hostages dead, including two Americans.
Military chief Hermogenes Esperon said Moguera was a member of a terror cell connected with Jemaah Islamiyah fugitive Dulmatin, who has been evading a US-backed offensive in the southern Philippines since fleeing Indonesia shortly after the 2002 bombings on Bali.
Moguera was arrested with two other people. Police raided the house of another Abu Sayyaf suspect in Puerto Princesa on Sunday, and apprehended two more people amid fears that terrorists may target the city hall, public markets and beach resorts.
Another man was caught in General Santos city on Saturday, on Mindanao, carrying a homemade bomb he allegedly planned to set off inside a shopping mall, a top police official said.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS