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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 17, 2002
TABIAWAN, Philippines -- Grenade blasts ripped through a market and a movie theater in the southern Philippines on Saturday, killing at least five people as more U.S. troops arrived under tight security to join a growing American force on a new front in the campaign against terrorism.
The blasts -- one a few miles from a base where U.S. military personnel are staying -- underscored dangers they could face while advising and training Philippine troops fighting the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim rebel group U.S. officials say has been linked with al-Qaida.
Two C-130 transport planes with 30 to 40 Special Forces troops aboard flew in from Okinawa, Japan, the second landing on a darkened runway in Zamboanga city with its lights extinguished. It was unloaded with the engines running and then took off again.
The soldiers are joining 250 Americans in Zamboanga for a six-month exercise focusing on Basilan, an island about 20 miles south of Zamboanga where the guerrillas have been holding an American missionary couple captive for months.
The U.S. contingent is to grow to 660 in the coming weeks, including about 160 Special Forces troops who are the only American personnel allowed to travel to Basilan. An advance team flew to the island Saturday to get set up at a Philippine army camp.
One grenade exploded at dawn on Jolo, an island 75 miles southwest of Basilan where an Abu Sayyaf faction has a presence, killing at least five people and injuring more than 40 near a crowded market, authorities said.
Hours later, a grenade exploded at a movie theater in downtown Zamboanga, the region's largest city, injuring at least five people watching The Lord of the Rings.
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- The makeshift prison at Guantanamo Bay holding suspected terrorists hit capacity Saturday after 12 men filled out paperwork and filed into their small chain-link and concrete cells.
The men arrived late Friday, bringing the number of detainees to 300, said Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of the task force operating the facility.
Camp X-Ray has 320 temporary, open-air cells of chain-link fence walls set on a concrete slab. But officials plan to keep 20 units empty.
"That gives us some flexibility," said Col. Terry Carrico, a commander, "in case we would have to isolate anybody for medical reasons or for any indiscipline."
Most of the detainees, who spend their days praying and eating in their 8-by-8 cells, have been interrogated at least once, Lehnert said.
Military interrogators are trying to separate the Taliban fighters from al-Qaida and determine how much they knew about the network that planned the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Each day, we get a clearer picture of our detainees and the extent of their involvement in terrorist activity," Lehnert said. "I use the analogy of a sweater. As you begin to unravel one piece at a time, a piece of innocuous information from one detainee joined with another piece of information elsewhere may pull up something useful to us."
KARACHI, Pakistan -- A hoped-for breakthrough in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl slipped away Saturday after police reached the home of a key suspect minutes too late, officials said.
Police were holding the suspect's two brothers in an attempt to flush him out, said Tariq Jamil, deputy police chief in the southern port city of Karachi. The country's interior minister announced two more arrests but gave no further details.
GENEVA -- Taliban officials dramatically inflated the number of people living in Afghanistan's largest camp for displaced people, a new survey by relief officials says.
The population of the Maslakh camp, near the western city of Herat, is 118,000, Niurka Pineiro, spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, said Friday. Until now, aid agencies have been supplying aid based on a figure of 324,000 -- the number given by the Taliban.
As a result of the survey, relief workers will step up efforts to provide aid directly to people in their homes and tighten restrictions on distributions inside the camp, Pineiro said.
To conduct the survey, agencies sealed Maslakh camp and re-registered the population, fitting a nonremoveable plastic bracelet to each person.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The Taliban's former supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, is believed to be in Afghanistan, holed up in remote and rugged central mountains, a Kandahar provincial government spokesman said Saturday.
"We have had certain indications" that Omar is in the northwest of central Uruzgan province, said Yusuf Pashtun, spokesman for Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha.
Winter weather, rough terrain, bad communications and a shortage of precise intelligence are slowing the effort to pinpoint his whereabouts, Pashtun said.
GIULIANI HONORED: German Interior Minister Otto Schily called former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani "the mayor of the world" Saturday as he presented him with the German Media Prize, his second European honor this week. Giuliani dedicated the figurine to the heroism of New Yorkers.