MANILA, Philippines (AP) – Philippine forces captured a suspected Indonesian suicide bomber Saturday who the military said was concerned about a “very imminent” plot to attack a southern city, authorities said.
Army and police troops arrested Rezky Fantasya Rullie along with two Filipino women, suspected of being Abu Sayyaf militants, in a space in the southern town of Jolo, in Sulu province, where they discovered an explosive vest and bomb components , Western Mindanao. The Military Command told me.
The army also announced that Rullie’s husband Andi Baso, wanted in the Philippines and Indonesia for his alleged involvement in bombings, had been killed in a confrontation on 29 August near the town of Patikul in Sulu.
Philippine troops have stepped up the search for potential attackers in the restless south following near-simultaneous suicide attacks through two militants who killed 15 other people and wounded another 75 in August in the town of Jolo in the country’s worst extremist attack this year.
The two women who carried out the 24 August suicide bombings in Jolo were the dead activists of Abu Sayyaf, suggesting that extremism has implicated families in some cases.
“He has a circle of relatives, a matter of a few who have been unfairly indoctrinated,” Army leader Lieutenant General Cirilito Sobejana told The Associated Press.
At least eight other foreign militants in Sulu and the southern province of Maguindanao were being persecuted through government forces, which come with militants from Indonesia and Egypt, Sobejana said.
Rullie, concerned about a “very imminent” plot to carry out a suicide bombing in Jolo before his arrest, said Sobejana without giving details, adding that the Indonesian government was aware of Philippine efforts to locate and capture Indonesian militants in the southern Philippines.
Rullie’s parents were a pair of activists who, according to the Philippine authorities, organized a suicide bombing that killed more than 20 people and wounded more than a hundred people at Sunday Mass in Jolo Cathedral in the Muslim-majority province of Sulu, the army said.
His wife, Andi Baso, was charged with an explosion in 2016 that killed a child and wounded three others in a church in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province. Sobejana said she was killed in a troop shootout in Sulu in August and that a DNA check is underway to check whether a frame recovered through the Indonesian militant’s troops.
Rullie arrested along with two other women, adding Inda Nurhaina, who according to the army is the wife of Abu Sayyaf commander Ben Yadah.
Yadah, known by his war name Ben Tatoo, is one of the suspects in the 2016 beheadings in Sulu of two Canadian tourists kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf gunmen in search of a ransom. in Sulu.
The United States and the Philippines have blacklisted Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organization for bombings, kidnappings for rescue purposes and beheadings. It has weakened through setbacks, surrenders and factions, but remains a risk to national security with a number of small armed teams related to the Islamic State group.