Ekip
23 July 2016•Update: 24 July 2016
By P Prem Kumar
KUALA LUMPUR
Malaysian police announced Saturday the arrest of 14 Daesh-linked suspects and the recovery of explosives they allegedly planned to use in an attack on senior officers.
National police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said in a statement that the force's counter-terrorism division nabbed the 14 people in several states in Malaysia, and seized an improvised explosive device weighing one kilogram.
"The 13 men and one women were all Malaysian citizens," he said.
He added that some of those arrested were equipped with bomb-making knowledge, with one admitting to having shared such techniques with other members of the Daesh movement via the Telegram messaging platform.
"They are suspected of receiving directions from Muhamad Wandy Mohamed Jedi to conduct attacks in Malaysia," he said, referring to a Malaysian-born Daesh leader known to recruit locals to join the terror movement in Syria.
Bakar said one suspect also confessed to receiving orders from Jedi to carry out attacks in the Klang Valley, which surrounds Kuala Lumpur, and to having been provided a gun to avoid arrest.
Those arrested will be held under the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act.
The arrests are the latest related to Daesh-linked suspects since Malaysian police confirmed the group’s involvement in a grenade explosion at an entertainment center in the capital last month -- which marked its first attack in the Southeast Asian country.
