The Philippines said on Tuesday its security forces had foiled a "Madrid-level" terror attack in the capital Manila by arresting four suspected Islamic militants and seizing a large amount of explosives.
Officials said the four suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah militant groups had been arrested in separate raids in Manila, including in the Makati business area.
"We have pre-empted a Madrid-level attack on the metropolis by capturing an explosive cache of 80 pounds (36 kg) of TNT which was intended to be used for bombing malls and trains in Metro Manila," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a firm backer of the U.S. war on terror, said on national television.
"Follow-up operations are ongoing. They will be relentless."
Arroyo's announcement of the plot comes three weeks after bombs exploded in four packed Madrid commuter trains just before national elections, killing 190 people in an attack blamed on militants linked to al-Qaida.
The attacks precipitated the defeat of Spain's government in the elections in a backlash against its support for the Iraq war.
All the candidates running against Arroyo in Philippine national elections on May 10 have expressed support for the U.S.-led war on terror and the Iraq invasion.
"What we have arrested are elements of the Abu Sayyaf and the JI (Jemaah Islamiah)," National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales told Reuters. "We don't know which was the leading one."
Al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiah has been blamed for a series of bomb blasts in Manila in December 2000, including one on a train, that killed 22 people.
Arroyo said that one of the captured militants was the suspected executioner of American citizen Guillermo Sobero, who was beheaded after being kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf in 2001, while another was implicated in a bombing in southern Zamboanga City the following year in which a U.S. serviceman died.
Arroyo also said that one of the men had claimed responsibility for the sinking of a passenger ferry near Manila last month in which more than 100 people died. The government had previously cast doubt on Abu Sayyaf's claim to have set fire to the ferry before it sank.
The southern Philippines is home to four Muslim rebel groups, including the Abu Sayyaf, and is suspected of being a training ground for Jemaah Islamiah.