Suicide bomber behind airport blast

A young separatist guerrilla carrying explosives in a backpack triggered the airport bombing in Davao which left 21 people dead, defence officials said yesterday.

The 23-year-old Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebel was among the dead in Tuesday's blast which also injured more than 150, they said.

Defence spokesman Lt. Col. Danilo Servando identified the suspect as Muntazer Sudang, 23, a resident of Kabacan town, Mindanao island, of which Davao is the commercial capital.

"Sudang was one of the fatalities in the Davao blast," Servando said in Manila.

"He was the bomb carrier," Servando said, adding the bomb may have "prematurely exploded."

It was not immediately clear if the suspect planned to leave the package in the airport or planned to die in the attack.

Suicide bombing is almost unheard of in the Philippines and is not known to have been used as a strategy by Muslim or communist rebel groups.

The 12,500-member MILF, the country's largest separatist group waging a 25-year campaign for an Islamic state in the southern third of the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines, has denied any hand in the blast.

MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said the government charge that a MILF bomber triggered the blast was "a total lie" and was part of a campaign to discredit the group.

The Abu Sayyaf group, also operating in the south, on Wednesday claimed responsibility for the blast but said the bomb had gone off earlier than intended.

The government had rejected the Abu Sayyaf claim.

The MILF has been linked to Al Qaida's Southeast Asian chapter, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), accused of staging the bomb attack on the Indonesian island of Bali last October that killed 202 people.

The government detained 20 people following the Davao blast, including five they suspected of having links to Sudang, who allegedly carried a powerful pipe bomb typically used by Moro militants.

Feisty Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte yesterday accused MILF chairperson Salamat Hashim of having a direct hand in the airport blast.

At a press conference in Davao yesterday, Duterte said he was in contact with the MILF weeks before the bombing.

"I was trying to get through to Salamat after we received intelligence reports that Davao City will be bombed unless the government stops its offensive in Mindanao. MILF officials told me Salamat was in Malaysia. One month after that conversation, the bomb blast occurred," he said.

But in a press statement, Salamat and MILF deputy chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim and other members of the MILF central committee condemned the bomb blast.

Hashim described the blast as a "horrible and dastardly act" committed against innocent people and whose perpetrators are totally unmindful of the place where they carried out their evil act.

Duterte said that in the course of the arrests, government forces recovered "half a sack of explosives," adding that it was "enough to blow all of us to kingdom come".

Forensic experts from the U.S. and Australia are to help local authorities in the investigations, President Gloria Arroyo said yesterday.

Evidence of the Davao bom-ber's identity were obtained from the blast site, officials said. His relatives were arrested and questioned when they went to a hospital morgue to claim his remains.

Investigators then cross-checked a roster of MILF recruits recovered by a military unit following a clash in the southern town of Kabacan with one of its units in 2000, defence department records showed.

Sundang had apparently joined the MILF soon after he turned 16. Police sources in Davao named Mastura Gumawan, the senior leader of the MILF forces in the Cotabato region that includes Kabacan town, as the man who "directed" the Davao attack.

The MILF's Davao commander Ibrahim Lais was against the plot, the sources added.