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When Saifullah (Muklis) Yunos set out on a bombing mission two months ago, he knew that as the Philippines' most wanted terrorist he risked recognition. So Muklis came up with a novel disguise. He appeared at the airport in Cagayan de Oro, a city on the strife-torn southern island of Mindanao, on a stretcher, complete with a heavily bandaged face and a plaster cast on one leg. As if to complete what could be interpreted as a sickening homage to his previous victims, he swallowed a tranquilizer at the advice of his traveling companion, Egyptian Diah al-Gabri, and passed out.

Muklis didn't stay asleep for long. Security officials, tipped off when al-Gabri's name popped up on a terrorist watch list issued by the U.S., arrested the two men before they could board their flight and whisked them to police headquarters in Manila. There, Muklis was subjected to an intensive, four-day grilling by members of a joint team of interrogators assembled from a range of Philippine law-enforcement agencies.

Muklis' confession, detailed in a 92-page transcript and an accompanying 18-page analysis obtained by TIME, is explosive. A key bombmaker and trainer for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which has been waging a guerrilla campaign for an independent Muslim state on Mindanao for decades, Muklis told his interrogators that he was on his way to Manila to launch a bombing campaign that was to include a suicide attack on the presidential palace using a gasoline tanker. Muklis said he had been hired for the mission by al-Gabri at the direct orders of Miston Maumar, father-in-law to the MILF's veteran leader Hashim Salamat. Most revealing of all was Muklis' casual acknowledgment—despite strenuous denials by both the MILF and Manila—that large numbers of non-Filipino Islamic radicals have been—and probably still are—receiving military training in jungle camps located in guerrilla-controlled areas of Mindanao. The confession could prove to be a stumbling block to the resumption of peace talks between Manila and the MILF, currently scheduled to restart by Aug. 8 in Kuala Lumpur.

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During the 1990s, hundreds of militants from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand trained in Mindanao under the auspices of the MILF, many of them graduating to become key operatives for Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the loose confederation of radical groups blamed for numerous deadly bombings across Southeast Asia, including last October's Bali blasts. In theory, however, militant training was supposed to have stopped when Philippine army units overran the main MILF base, Camp Abubakar, in 2000 and captured three adjacent JI training camps.

But in recent months a consensus has been growing among intelligence officials in the region that those facilities are operating again, providing critical refuge and training for an organization still reeling from the arrests of dozens of its key members in the last year-and-a-half. This is not a matter of a ragtag band playing war games in the jungle. Senior intelligence officials—including those from the Philippines—say privately that JI has at least one and possibly two well-established camps in Mindanao at which groups of about 30 recruits undergo structured training in weaponry, bombmaking and evading capture. According to a senior Indonesian police source, one such base is Camp Jabal Quba, a facility located in central Mindanao that he says completed its latest round of terrorist teachings in May. It comes as no surprise that exactly the same area was pinpointed by Muklis in his confession as being the site of a "detail" of guards watching over a camp that houses a large number of foreigners.

The importance of such camps to JI's continued existence cannot be exaggerated, say terrorism experts and intelligence officials. "Without them, JI would collapse," says Rohan Gunaratna, author of a book called Inside al-Qaeda. "Given the number of operatives who have been captured, JI needs these bases to replenish its losses." Zachary Abuza, who wrote Crucible of Terror, a forthcoming study of JI, concurs: "So long as the MILF gives these guys a base area to retreat to, there will be a terrorism problem in Southeast Asia."

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