By Rexcel Sorza, IOL Correspondent

ILOILO CITY, March 29 (IslamOnline.net) - Filipino Muslims Monday, March 29, condemned Friday’s raid of a boarding school for Muslim reverts in Quezon City, where police claimed six terrorists were hiding.

“What we have feared has started. The raid conducted last Friday of the offices and madrasah (school) of the Fi Sabillah is an indication that the NCRPO [National Capital Region Police Office] is hell-bent on concocting anything in order to convince that terrorists are hiding in Muslim communities in Metro Manila.

“This kind of incident is a rampant practice of the army and the police long suffered by Muslims, as the anti-Muslim hysteria fanned by the Arroyo government takes on more brutal facets,” Amirah Ali Lidasan, secretary general of the Moro-Christian People’s Alliance, told IslamOnline.net in a statement received Monday.

“Through such schemes,” she said, “they are conditioning the public that their allegations that Muslims are harboring terrorists are right. Worst, the NCRPO indiscriminately tags any Muslim as an Abu Sayyaf member.”

Abu Sayyaf, which has carried out high-profile kidnap-for-ransom activities, is a group listed as a terrorist organization by the Philippines, United States and the European Union.

Lidasan, who is also a nominee for Philippine Congress of the Suara Bangsamoro party, lamented: “No Muslim is safe in Mindanao, no Muslim is safe in Metro Manila, everywhere we go in this country there would always be reasons concocted by the government to brand us either as terrorists or as terrorist lovers.”

Elite teams of police officers swooped down on the four-storey Fi Sabillah building in Cubao, Quezon City in the capital Metro Manila around 2 p.m. Friday, March 27. They were armed with a warrant to search the building’s first floor but when they failed to find what they were looking for there, they went up the second until the fourth floors.

The last floor is the home of Ustadz Ahmad Santos, the imam and administrator of the Fi Sabilillah. It was on the fourth floor that the police said they found the prohibited explosives, and literatures and videos on terrorism. But the residents of the building, including the wives of Ahmad Santos, cried foul saying the explosives found in their home were planted.

The police had the arrest warrant for Ahmad Santos and Daud Santos, for illegal possession of firearms under the gun ban provision of the Omnibus Elections Code. The two were previously implicated to have connections with the Abu Sayyaf and were supposedly training terrorists in their madrasah in Anda, Tarlac.

Finding no terrorist, they arrested two women, including the two wives of Ahmad Santos - Fatima, 29 and Nur'ain, 27, who were brought to Camp Caringal in Quezon City.

Lidasan added that their group believes that the armlet rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, C-4 and other explosives allegedly found by the NCRPO in the Madrasah were just “planted” by the police officers themselves.

Journalists, interestingly, were prohibited from going with the raiding team inside the building to observe the proceedings.

Daud Santos was also a former “victim” of illegal arrest and illegal detention conducted by the Philippine National Police in a madrasah in Tarlac in 2002. She said they were later released because no hard evidence was found against them.

Lidasan underscored that this pattern of “arrest and release” has been the fate suffered by already thousands of Moro men and even women, especially in the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Basilan Siege in 2001 and the “State of Lawless Violence” in Davao in 2003.

Lidasan stressed that the combined force of the anti-terror elite force, formed recently as the Arroyo government’s response to the Madrid train blasts, and the “marking” and isolation of Muslim individuals through the national identification (ID)  system may just be another upturn of the government’s “incessant war and propaganda attacks” against the Muslims.

She added that that while the anti-terror elite force ensures that Muslim communities, branded from the onset as “terrorist havens,” are cordoned off and carefully watched, the ID system on the other hand, swiftly and conveniently lay grounds for arrest if the individual bears no ID.

She expressed fears of foreboding upsurge of human rights violations against Muslims which she said is inevitable against this picture.

“It angers us and saddens us deeply that the Arroyo government, who has the guts to campaign in Moro communities, has been shamelessly setting a trend of bias and discrimination against Muslims. The National ID System and the anti-terror elite force are not the answers to the peace crisis in the country.

“If only the state and its military will genuinely serve the people instead of cow towing the insatiable greed of its foreign masters, if only the government will sincerely respect the rights of the Bangsamoro people, then, peace and justice will be realized.

“Sadly, this is not the case, this hence necessitates far greater vigilance among our Muslim brethren,” Lidasan said, as she called on all peace advocates and civil libertarians to be on guard and be steadfast in the quest for genuine peace.

Source : http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-03/29/article05.shtml