Philippine security officials yesterday allowed a Saudi Airlines pilot to leave the country after investigators found he had no relationship to a man being questioned in Florida in connection with the terrorist attacks on the US earlier this week.
Mohammad Omar Al-Bokhari spent the night at the Philippine National Police headquarters where he was brought after immigration officials held him at the Manila airport before he was to fly to Riyadh on Friday.
National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said Bokhari was put under "character verification custody" as part of a Philippine investigation "in close collaboration with US authorities."
"We gave the clearance to the police to have him released," Golez said, adding that the decision was made by a Cabinet group in charge of national security.
"We just wanted to be sure," Golez said. "There was assurance from the government of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Air."
Philippine officials believed Bokhari might be a brother of Adnan Bukhari, 41, who has been questioned about the US attacks and is a student at Flightsafety International in Florida, which trains commercial jet crews. An apparent relative, Ameer Bukhari, was a student pilot there when he was killed in a mid-air collision exactly a year before Tuesday's attack and Philippine officials said they believed Al-Bokhari attended the same school.
"I have no brother over there," Bokhari said as he was led away by immigration officers and police carrying submachine guns.
"He is not related" to Bukhari, Golez said. "We just wanted to be sure. ... We continue doing these verification checks. We cannot be over-careful here."
"He understands that these are very difficult times," Golez said.
Immigration chief Andrea Domingo said Philippine authorities became suspicious after they learned Bokhari was a last-minute substitution in the crew for flight SV862 from Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to Manila on Thursday.
He had been scheduled to fly to Riyadh on Friday afternoon, but the flight left without him as he was questioned and fingerprinted at Manila's international airport.
There was no immediate word on when Bokhari was to leave Manila.
Last week, three Middle Eastern men engaged in "suspicious" videotaping of the American Embassy in Manila were questioned by police but were allowed to go because they had committed no known crime. They left the Philippines the next day.
Philippine officials later said the men, all carrying Omani passports with the family name Al-Shehhi, could have been part of a bombing plot against the US Embassy.
The hotel rooms where they were staying, across the street from the embassy, were searched Wednesday, a day after the name Marwan Alshehhi emerged as a suspect in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Philippine presidential spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao said a US technician who participated in the search of the Bayview Hotel ran two tests for the presence of explosives: one was positive for TNT chemicals; the other was negative.
A US Embassy statement said the three Omani men were engaged in "suspicious activity" on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8, with local police questioning them the second day after embassy security pointed them out. Police checked the men's videotapes, which showed tourist attractions, then let them go.
"They couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Sept. 11 attack," Tiglao said.
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