Jail Defects Abetted Terrorist’s Escape

Fathur Rohman Al Ghozi did what many travelers do before taking a big trip: He got a haircut. He packed all his belongings. And he contacted his friends on his cell phone to tell them he was coming.

Then he walked out of his supposedly high-security jail cell at the Philippine police headquarters and vanished into the night.

The July 14 escape of the Jemaah Islamiah bomb maker along with two cellmates belonging to the brutal Abu Sayyaf kidnapping gang shocked the nation and has triggered a manhunt by 5,000 officers and 63 special police tracking teams.

The jailbreak is one of the biggest setbacks in Southeast Asia’s struggle against Islamic extremists since two Bali nightclub bombings last October that killed 202 people. Al Ghozi, an Indonesian, is considered one of the Jemaah Islamiah operatives most capable of organizing and carrying out a large-scale attack.

A $180,000 reward for Al Ghozi, a huge sum by Philippine standards, has produced Elvis-style sightings. On one recent day, he was reported to be in six different places. But despite the police mobilization and official assurances that he would soon be recaptured, the 32-year-old fugitive, also known as “Mike the Bombmaker,” continues to elude his pursuers.

Some officials fear that he has already hooked up with fellow extremists and begun planning new attacks in the region -- a concern heightened by the car bombing Tuesday of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, that killed 10 people. The soft-spoken Indonesian, who trained in Afghanistan in the 1990s, has ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the southern Philippines.

“Al Ghozi is a leader,” said Philippine police intelligence officer Rodolfo Mendoza, who interviewed him in jail. “Al Ghozi has the capacity to plan. He is very, very cool. He is not afraid.”

Before his arrest in January 2002, Al Ghozi teamed up with some of the alleged Bali bombers and helped stage attacks in Manila and Jakarta that killed 24 people.

During interrogation, Al Ghozi gave police details of his training, travels and involvement in bomb plots in three countries. He was sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison for obtaining more than a ton of explosives he planned to use to bomb embassies in Singapore. He was sentenced to an additional five years for immigration violations. He was about to be tried on murder charges for his part in the Manila blasts when he broke out of jail.

Al Ghozi’s escape from Camp Crame, the sprawling national police headquarters in the center of metropolitan Manila, humiliated President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and highlighted corruption and incompetence in the police department.

“It’s a big embarrassment,” acknowledged Roilo Golez, Arroyo’s national security advisor.

There has been a flurry of allegations that police received bribes to let Al Ghozi go, or that they released him in a plot to undermine the president. At least four officers, including the head of the intelligence unit responsible for holding him, are in custody and under investigation.

But given the way things work at Camp Crame, it is possible that Al Ghozi simply got away with a little help from his friends. Although authorities said they were holding him in a high-security prison, he actually was being kept in a cell on the second floor of an aging office building with only rudimentary security.

The camp was already well known for the escape of high-profile prisoners, including Khadafi Abubakar Janjalani, the current Abu Sayyaf leader who slipped out of the same cell in 1995 by climbing through a duct in the ceiling.

Jemaah Islamiah, a Southeast Asian terrorist network, and Abu Sayyaf both have long-standing ties to Al Qaeda. Authorities have previously said that they had no evidence of the two groups working together. They do now.

Police inexplicably put Al Ghozi in a cell with two Abu Sayyaf members, Abdulmukim Ong Edris and Merang Abante, who are both accused of kidnapping Americans.

Edris allegedly participated in the kidnapping of 20 people, including three Americans, at a resort on Palawan island. Guillermo Sobero, a tourist from Corona, Calif., was beheaded, and missionary Martin Burnham of Wichita, Kan., was killed during a rescue raid. Edris was also blamed for bombings in the southern Philippines that claimed 12 lives, including one attack in October that killed a U.S. Green Beret.

Abante was allegedly involved in the kidnapping of American Jeffrey Schilling of Oakland, who was later freed.

The three inmates were aided by Abu Ali, who had been arrested for helping Al Ghozi buy explosives. He had turned state’s evidence and agreed to testify against Al Ghozi.

The police then released Ali from custody but gave him lodging and a job as janitor at the compound. Having gained the trust of the police, Ali was free to roam the jail, where he served as Al Ghozi’s link to the outside world. After the escape, Ali was rearrested and described to police how he helped the three prisoners get away.

Three months before the breakout, Ali told the prisoners that the door to their cell could be opened by lifting up the bars and pushing them out of their holes in the concrete wall.

“Apparently it could be opened without opening the padlock,” said police spokesman Ricardo De Leon. “That was a defect.”

Ali said he brought cooking oil from the kitchen to lubricate the bars so they wouldn’t squeak on the night of the breakout.

Ali gave the three cellmates information about the guards’ routine and the best escape route. He bought Al Ghozi a cell phone so the prisoner could make arrangements for the getaway.

Once out of their cell, Al Ghozi and his cellmates could walk down a flight of stairs, past a guardroom and out an unlocked door to the yard outside.

The biggest danger was getting past the guardroom, but the guards were sleeping the night of the escape, police said.

From the door it was only about 20 feet to the jail compound’s 7-foot outer wall. There is no barbed wire, no guard tower, no security patrol. Trees grow on both sides of the wall, providing excellent cover.

Most likely, the escapees walked right through a flimsy wooden gate that was usually left unlocked and unguarded. It has since been boarded up.

Once outside the jail compound, leaving Camp Crame was simple.

Security was so lax that an accomplice could have driven onto the base hours before the breakout and parked near the wall to wait for Al Ghozi, Edris and Abante. Police ask visitors to show identification when entering the base, but they do not bother keeping a record of who comes and goes.

The prisoners were not required to wear a distinctive prison uniform, so once they were outside the wall, they could easily blend in.

On the Saturday before the escape, Al Ghozi asked guards to bring in a barber, who cut his hair and shaved the beard he had grown since his arrest. Police did not go to the trouble of taking a new photo of Al Ghozi afterward.

Sometime that Sunday, Al Ghozi packed up family photos and his other personal belongings.

The guards typically filled out a log sheet reporting on the prisoners’ whereabouts without bothering to check whether they were in their cells. As a result, police are not sure when the prisoners escaped, but they say it was sometime between 10 p.m. Sunday and 5 a.m. Monday. The police were so slow to notify their superiors that word of the escape did not reach the president until Monday afternoon, when a nationwide alert was issued. The trio had a head start of as many as 15 hours.

An angry Arroyo created an independent commission to investigate the escape.

“If there was collusion, this is the gravest act against our national security done so far by persons within the government,” the president said.

On Thursday, officials said soldiers had captured Edris at a checkpoint on the island of Mindanao. Edris agreed to lead troops to Al Ghozi’s hide-out, authorities said, but then grabbed a soldier’s rifle in an attempt to escape. Soldiers shot and killed him. A massive search for Al Ghozi continued in the area on Friday.

The son of an Islamic militant, Al Ghozi attended the Al Mukmin boarding school in central Java, which was co-founded by radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged leader of Jemaah Islamiah. Bashir is now on trial in Jakarta for treason.

After graduation, Al Ghozi went to Afghanistan, where he received training in Al Qaeda camps. Jemaah Islamiah recruited him and sent him to the Philippines to learn the language and make contact with local militant groups.

Within a few years, he was fluent enough in Tagalog to be taken for a native. He hooked up with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and went to Camp Abubakar, then the group’s main base, and began training other militants to handle explosives. After the Philippine military attacked and shut down Camp Abubakar, Jemaah Islamiah decided to seek revenge.

In August 2000, Al Ghozi joined a team of operatives under the direction of a man named Hambali -- an Al Qaeda operative who is Jemaah Islamiah’s operations chief -- and detonated a car bomb outside the Jakarta residence of Philippine Ambassador Leonides Caday. The ambassador was seriously injured. Two others were killed.

Al Ghozi told police that he set off the bomb. Police say at least five of those who carried out the attack were later involved in the Bali nightclub blasts: Hambali, Imam Samudra, Mubarok, Dulmatin and Amrozi bin H. Nurhasyim, who was convicted Thursday and sentenced to death for his part in the Bali bombings.

Al Ghozi told police that in December 2000, he helped stage bombings in Manila at a transit station and four other civilian targets. The near-simultaneous blasts, also carried out under Hambali’s direction, killed 22 and wounded 100.

A year later, Al Ghozi was helping plan seven simultaneous car bomb attacks on embassies and other targets in Singapore when the plot was uncovered and more than a dozen Jemaah Islamiah members were arrested.

Acting on a tip from Singapore, Philippine authorities seized Al Ghozi as he was preparing to fly to Bangkok for a meeting of Jemaah Islamiah leaders. At the meeting, the group began planning the Bali attack without him.

The U.S., which has close relations with the Philippines in part because of Arroyo’s strong support for the Bush administration’s war against terrorism, was alarmed by Al Ghozi’s escape.

Francis Ricciardone, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, said Al Ghozi was one of Jemaah Islamiah’s most dangerous operatives, not just because of his skill with explosives but also because of his ability to organize and motivate others.

“This is a person who has no scruples about killing innocent people who might happen to be in a subway station or in a shopping mall,” the ambassador said. “It’s not merely the skill at killing, but it’s the coldblooded willingness, even eagerness, to murder people. People like that are very valuable in terrorist circles, and he can inspire others to be the same way. He’s a dangerous man.”