Malaysia’s top policeman yesterday said that 17 people, including two who recently returned from Syria, had been arrested on suspicion of plotting terror attacks in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Authorities in the Muslim-majority country have expressed increasing alarm over the threat of Muslim militancy in the wake of the Islamic State (IS) group’s bloody jihad in Syria and Iraq.
“Seventeen people were planning terror activities in Kuala Lumpur. Two of them had recently returned from Syria,” national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said in a Twitter post.
Khalid said the arrests took place on Sunday.
No other details, including the suspects’ nationalities or specifics of the alleged plot, were mentioned.
The tough-talking Khalid was also quoted by local media saying he “will never allow Malaysia to be a transit point or hideout for any terror groups.”
The government has increasingly warned that Malaysian recruits to the cause of the Islamic State, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, could return home with the group’s radical ideology.
Police in January said they had arrested a total of 120 people with suspected IS group links or sympathies, or who had sought to travel to Syria or Iraq.
They also said 67 Malaysians were known at the time to have gone abroad to join the IS, and that five had died fighting for the movement.
ANTI-TERRORISM BILL
Last week, the government introduced a new anti-terrorism bill to counter any potential threat. The bill allows authorities to detain terrorism suspects for potentially unlimited periods without trial, according to its critics.
The political opposition, legal organizations, Human Rights Watch and others have urged the government to withdraw the proposed new law, calling it oppressive.
The law “would reintroduce indefinite detention without trial or judicial review and violate due process rights in the name of preventing terrorism,” Human Rights Watch’s deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said in a statement.
CONTROVERSY
The subject of security laws is controversial in Malaysia, whose government is frequently accused of using them to silence political opponents.
A previous draconian internal security law that allowed detention without trial — and was repeatedly used against opposition politicians — was scrapped in 2012 amid public pressure for political reform.
In August last year, police said they had foiled an IS-inspired plot to bomb pubs, discos and a Malaysian brewery of Danish beer producer Carlsberg, arresting more than a dozen people.
A string of other suspected IS-related arrests have been announced since then.
However, the opposition says the authoritarian regime has shared no details of its claimed arrests, nor did it consult the opposition on the anti-terror legislation.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not