By Hader Glang
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines
FBI has confirmed that DNA evidence taken from a man killed by police commandos during a terror raid in the Philippines' Muslim south proves him to be the most wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported Wednesday that the death of Malaysian bomb-maker Zulkifli bin Hir, alias Marwan, was confirmed after the sample was matched with one obtained from his brother, who is detained at the United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Yes, it’s true. The U.S. has confirmed it’s Marwan," a police source told the Inquirer on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to media.
For weeks, confusion has reigned as to whether Marwan -- the focus of the Jan. 25 raid -- had actually died in the operation which also claimed the lives of 44 police commandos and a dozen rebels. A spokesman for one rebel group -- the Moro National Liberation Front even went as far as to claim that not only was Marwan still alive, he wasn't even in the area at the time of the raid.
Adding to the problem was that Marwan, who had a $5 million FBI bounty on his head, had previously been reported killed in a 2012 airstrike in Jolo -- an island stronghold of Abu Sayyaf insurgents in the Philippines' southern Sulu archipelago -- only for those reports to be later retracted.
The operation to target Marwan -- a leading figure in Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaeda-linked Southeast Asian group behind the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia -- saw around 400 police commandos descend on the southern province of Maguindanao, only to run into opposition from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters.
The police were also seeking to arrest Basit Usman, a Filipino bomb-maker linked to Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf, who is reported to have escaped.
During the exchange, reports said that Marwan was killed in an exchange of gunfire with commandos, one cutting off a finger from the corpse's right hand to make sure they had got the right man.
"Before withdrawing, a commando took pictures of the dead Marwan... The body was left in a hut," the International Security Agency reported on its website that.
Marwan's brother, Rahmat Abdhir, was arrested in California in 2007 on terrorism charges, accused of sending Marwan weapons, camouflage clothing and nearly 30 radios -- parts of which were discovered to have been used in a bomb that killed five people in the Philippines in 2006.
Their youngest brother, Taufik bin Abdul Halim, was also arrested on terrorism charges in 2001 for his role in the bombing of the Atrium Mall bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia.
