Seventeen mostly Muslim men were detained Thursday over a series of deadly bomb blasts that rocked the Philippine capital last weekend, military and police sources said.
The men, aged between 18 and 33 years, were seized in a pre-dawn raid in a suburb of Manila and are undergoing interrogation, the sources said, adding that three firearms had been confiscated from them.
National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Nicanor Bartolome declined to comment on the arrests but said that the near-simultaneous bombings that killed 17 people and injured nearly 100 others could have been triggered by cellular phones.
Earlier, government television said several suspects had been detained in relation to the five bomb blasts that went off in public places in Manila on Saturday. However it gave no details.
The sources did not say which group the bombers belonged to.
Leftist protest groups charged that the detained men were going to be used as scapegoats for the bombings.
The groups said that as many as 21 Muslim men had been seized from suburbs of Manila but some of them had since been released -- MANILA (AFP)
