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Sunday, March 11, 2007
Police to seek Interpol help to arrest exiled communist rebel leaders (7:30 p.m.)
MANILA -- Philippine police officials will seek help from Interpol to arrest two exiled communist guerrilla leaders for their alleged role in a rebel purge in the 1980s, the country's police chief said Sunday.
Police will request an Interpol "red notice" for Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison and National Democratic Front chairman Luis Jalandoni to prod other countries to arrest and send them back to the Philippines, police Director-General Oscar Calderon said.
A "red notice" is an Interpol request for a wanted person to be arrested for possible extradition. While the measure cannot force countries to arrest or extradite suspects, people with "red notice" status appear on Interpol's equivalent of a most-wanted list.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's government has intensified efforts to crush the guerrillas, who have been waging a 38-year Marxist rebellion in the countryside, with military offensives and a plan to proscribe the rebel group under a new anti-terrorism law.
Sison and Jalandoni, who live in the central Dutch city of Utrecht, were among 53 people ordered arrested last week after being indicted in the deaths of at least 15 rebels in a brutal rebel purge of suspected spies from 1985 to 1991, police said.
The bodies of the rebels, exhumed by forensic investigators from unmarked graves near Inopacan town in Leyte, were discovered in August last year with the help of four former guerrillas, police said. (AP)
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