Agencies/Kuala Lumpur

Ten terrorism suspects detained in Malaysia were picked up in connection with their links to a Syrian preacher, a witness to the arrests said yesterday.

A report in the New Straits Times newspaper yesterday, linking the 10 suspects to the Nigerian passenger on a US flight who tried to detonate a bomb on December 25 could not be confirmed.

The witness identified the preacher as Syrian national Aiman al-Dakkak, a 50 year-old freelance religious teacher who has been living in Malaysia since 2003.

Malaysia’s home minister on Wednesday announced that one Malaysian and nine foreign nationals had been arrested under the country’s Internal Security Act (ISA), suspected of links with international militant groups, but gave no further details.

Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country, has sometimes used the ISA – allowing indefinite detention without trial – to round up militants, including those linked to Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which has campaigned for a Muslim caliphate across Southeast Asia.

A top JI leader, Noordin Top, was a Malaysian who was killed in a police raid last year in Indonesia.

The witness to last week’s roundup, Malaysian Mohamed Yunus Zainal Abidin, said he was part of a group of about 50 men who were attending religious classes given by Aiman at his house at a village on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur on January 21 when police stormed the house.

The 50 men were mostly international students aged between 20 and 40 and comprising Malaysians, Nigerians, Eritreans, Syrians, Jordanians, a Saudi Arabian and an American.

Yunus said the police, wearing bullet proof vests and armed with machine guns, took all the men to a police training centre in Kuala Lumpur.

They were then asked if any of them were from Yemen, Russia or Pakistan, before being separated by nationalities and questioned, Yunus said.

“They asked what were our plans, what did he (Aiman) teach us,” said Yunus who spoke to reporters at a news conference in the capital organised by an anti-ISA advocacy and support group, the Abolish ISA Movement.

Yunus said all of the men were released about 3am local time yesterday after being questioned, except for 12 individuals including Aiman, who Yunus denied had any militant links.

Yunus provided the names and nationalities of nine of the detainees, including one Malaysian, four Syrians, two Nigerians, a Yemen national and a Jordanian.

The anti-ISA movement chairman Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh said he could not verify the actual number of people the police are holding under the act.

“The detentions may have been initiated in response to international pressure on terrorist threats in Malaysia … but nothing can be confirmed,” said Syed Ibrahim, who urged the government to either charge the men in court or release them.

“In any case, the ISA is a convenient tool to use to avert pressure by making foreigners – in this case mostly from the Middle East region – into scapegoats,” he said.