The vehicle was found near where a car containing two Thai students came to rest after plunging off a cliff in late July.

The passengers were identified as Yinan Wang, 31, of San Diego, and his wife, Jie Song, 32, of China, who were last seen on August 6 at Crystal Caves in Sequoia National Park. The couple had planned to drive to Fresno that night, stay in a hotel and continue on to Yosemite National Park the next day. Their relatives alerted police after they did not hear from them.

The Thais, Thiwadee Saengsuriyarit, 24, and Bhakapon Chairattanasongporn, 28, were students from South Florida University who were on their way to Kings Canyon National Park. They were last seen on July 26.

Their rental car was spotted a few days later but their bodies and the vehicle were only retrieved from King’s River on September 2. At the time, Fresno authorities said any rescue attempt would be unsafe due to bad weather and a strong river current.

During the retrieval of the Thais’ vehicle, a deputy sheriff spotted in a video a licence plate lying in the bush that did not belong to the students’ vehicle.

He checked and discovered later that the plate belonged to the car of a Chinese couple that had gone missing.

On August 12, officials flew helicopters above the canyon and found what appeared to be submerged wreckage. However, due to rapids and high water levels, attempts to access the area were delayed.

On October 5, Fresno County Sheriff’s Office issued a statement saying the car had been retrieved. Two bodies were extracted from the wreckage, which was pulled on to a riverbank. After autopsies late last week, the Sheriff’s Office positively identified the bodies as the Chinese couple.

Video of the rescue operation by Fresno County’s Sheriff Office

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s middle son, Hun Manith, was among 28 officers to receive high-level promotions in the military, with the now three-star general continuing his rise through the ranks of the armed forces and ruling party.

According to the latest edition of the Royal Gazette, Manith, 35, was promoted to lieutenant general in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces along with four of his peers, 12 brigadier generals were promoted to major general and 11 colonels will now be brigadier generals.

The new promotion marks another feather in the cap of the premier’s son, who earlier this year was made deputy head of the Cambodian People’s Party’s internal monitoring team and in August was appointed as general director of the Defence Ministry’s Military Intelligence Department.

While Defence Ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat could not be reached yesterday, CPP spokesman Sok Eysan took umbrage with questions regarding the scion’s ascendency within the military – making a reference to US President Donald Trump’s family business.

“When Donald Trump became president, did he ask all his children to resign from all their businesses and not promote them to have any roles?” he asked.

In fact, there have been multiple calls for Trump to hand over his businesses to a blind trust to ensure there are no conflicts of interest, given that his children continue to operate family firms.

Political commentator Lao Mong Hay said the promotions were meant to consolidate Hun Sen’s family’s position within the military and to extend his power and influence.

“Now he places only the persons he trusts and are loyal to him, therefore his power becomes stronger and stronger,” he said.

Indonesia has seen a surge of cash into its technology sector over the past two years, helping support dozens of homegrown start-ups ranging from ride-hailing apps to e-commerce firms.

And with a population of more than 250 million, a swelling middle class and growing availability of cheap mobile devices, firms from across the world are piling in.

“We believe that Indonesia is poised for a huge leap forward for its digital economy, following China’s growth and becoming the leading tech destination in the Southeast Asia region,” Adrian Li, a partner in Jakarta-based Convergence Ventures, told AFP.

Last year $631 million in disclosed venture capital was ploughed into the country, according to research firm CB Insights, up from $31 million in 2015.

But that figure has already been shattered in 2017, with $3 billion worth of deals clinched as of September 2017, said Meghna Rao, a tech industry analyst at the firm.

Tokopedia  — a marketplace that allows users to set up online shops and handles transactions — won $1.1 billion in capital from China’s Alibaba in August.

Motorbike on-demand service Go-Jek secured $1.2 billion from Chinese tech giants JD.com and Tencent Holdings in May, according to data from Crunchbase.

In another sign of confidence, Koison became Indonesia’s first e-commerce service to go public in October.

“While it’s too soon to say that this investment is indicative of a larger pattern of Indonesian startups pulling in many big ticket investors, it is part of a growing clutch of mega-rounds,” Rao said.

– A golden opportunity –

========================

Internet use is growing faster in Southeast Asia than any other region in the world, with 124,000 users coming online every day over the next five years, according to a 2016 report from Google and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.

By 2020 an estimated 480 million people are expected to be connected to the internet, up from 260 million in the region last year.

Indonesia’s mobile-first market will comprise more than half of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market by 2025, with an estimated value of $46 billion, the Google report said.

“When you do startup business in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, the cost, effort and time that you spend is almost even. But when you go to Indonesia (growth) is unlimited — the market is so big,” said Willson Cuaca, whose venture capital firm East Ventures specialises in early-stage investments.

As a result, big names like US venture capitalist Sequoia Capital, Japan’s Rakuten Ventures and travel company Expedia — as well as Chinese tech giants — have all made investments in the country.

– Navigating challenges –

=========================

Indonesian president Joko Widodo has been a vocal supporter of digital innovation, most notably in his plan to create 1,000 local tech start-ups worth $10 billion by 2020. But the sector still faces a number of challenges.

A limited pool of engineering talent to draw from, low rates of internet penetration outside densely populated Java, bureaucratic delays, and poor quality infrastructure are all obstacles to growth.

For e-commerce companies, the large number of “unbanked” Indonesians limits the scope of online transactions, and logistics problems make it hard to move goods.

While young entrepreneurs and small businesses are flocking to co-working spaces springing up in major centres, it is a decidedly different scene in most parts of the country.

Farid Naufal Aslam, the chief executive of Aruna, an e-commerce company that links fishermen to buyers, said navigating Indonesia’s disparate communities is a challenge too.

“One of the biggest challenges faced is on social approach,” Aslam, 23, said. “Indonesia is a unique country with diverse communities and different customs in each region.”

Yet many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs remain optimistic.

“The window of opportunity is there,” Cuaca said. “As long as you can innovate and solve real problems using technology, you can be successful.”//AFP

Chinese scientists may have found a way to stop mosquitoes from spreading malaria, which kills one child every two minutes according to the World Health Organization.

Malaria affects between 200 and 300 million people worldwide every year according to the WHO. Infection is caused by Plasmodium, a parasite that is transmitted through mosquito bites.

A symbiotic bacterium that grows inside the bodies of mosquitoes was discovered by a team at the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology in Shanghai, and was genetically modified to carry anti-malaria genes that arrest the development of the parasites in the insects’ intestinal tracts.

“The bacteria proliferate rapidly in the intestinal tracts of mosquitoes after they take in human blood and thus the ability to inhibit the development of the parasites will increase dramatically,” said Wang Sibao, head of the research team at the institute, a branch of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences.

More important, the bacteria can be spread among mosquitoes quickly and widely during mating, and can be passed on to the next generation.

“When mosquitoes with such bacteria lay eggs in water, bacteria stuck to the surface of their eggs will propagate in the water and be ingested by the hatched larvae of the other mosquitoes, meaning that the capability of inhibiting the spread of the disease can be passed to other mosquitoes rapidly,” Wang said.

A paper about the research team’s findings was published on the website of Science, an international journal, on Friday.

The authors demonstrated that introducing 5 per cent of male or female mosquitoes colonised with the symbiotic bacteria was sufficient for the bacteria to spread through the population and colonise 100 per cent of mosquitoes for three subsequent generations, according to one peer review.

Another peer review said: “One of the bottlenecks of paratransgenesis has been the inability to maintain the bacteria in the insect for a prolonged period of time and, importantly, to spread the bacteria to the offspring. In this work, Wang showed that a specific bacterium found in mosquitoes can stay in the insect for a long period of time and be easily propagated to other mosquitoes.”

Wang said laboratory tests have been completed, and the team will conduct field experiments in some African countries.

The research may bring new insight to approaches for inhibiting the spread of other infectious diseases, such as dengue fever, which is also spread by mosquitoes, according to the institute.

According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, 3,189 Chinese citizens contracted malaria last year. It is increasingly difficult to prevent and fight the disease due to globalsation. Only three of the cases last year were contracted locally.

The number of self-employed South Koreans who run businesses without any employees is the fourth-largest among the world’s major nations, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Sunday.

According to the OECD’s Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2017 report, the number of self-employed workers in Korea was 3.98 million, the fourth-highest among all 35 OECD member countries as well as Lithuania, Romania and South Africa.

The country’s number of self-employed workers is considered to be relatively high considering the population size of Korea is roughly 50 million, the 27th-largest in the world.

The United States had the largest number of self-employed workers with a total of 9.82 million, followed by Mexico at 9.77 million. Turkey ranked No. 3 with 4.1 million self-employed CEOs. The remaining countries in the top 10 were made up of European nations including the UK, Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain and France.

Among Asian nations, Korea’s neighboring Japan ranked No. 21 with 397,000.

By gender, the number of Korean self-employed men was 2.77 million, once again coming in fourth after the US, Mexico and Turkey. The number of self-employed female CEOs was also the OECD’s fourth-highest at 1.21 million.

Despite the country’s high number of self-employed CEOs among the world’s leading economic nations, according to data released by the OECD last month, the rate of labor force participation for young Koreans last year ranked near the bottom among the organization’s member nations.

The OECD’s data showed that the labor force participation rate — people who are either employed or actively looking for employment — for Koreans between the ages of 25 and 29 was 76.7 percent last year. Korea tied with Chile for the No. 31 spot out of 35 countries.

In contrast, the nation’s senior citizens work force participation ranked among the OECD’s highest. The labor force participation rate for Koreans aged 65 and older reached 31.5 percent last year, the second-highest among all OECD members and more than double the OECD average of 14.5 percent for the age group.

A poll recently conducted by Beijing Foreign Studies University showed that the speed and convenience offered by high-speed rail, online shopping, shared bikes and mobile phone-based payment apps are the four things young expats in China view most favourably.

And of those four items, it seems likely that high-speed rail will remain on the list for a long time as the country works to retain its place as the home of the world’s fastest trains. Now, Chinese designers are developing a bullet train capable of achieving a top speed of 400 kilometres per hour on conventional tracks, along with a magnetic levitation, or maglev, train that is expected to run at 600 km/h.

The country is even considering the possibility of building a system based on a transnational tube that would allow specially designed trains to travel at 4,000 km/h.

Last month, designers at China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, one of the country’s biggest space contractors, announced that they had started research and development work on a futuristic ultrafast transportation system popularly known as a hyperloop.

The CASIC hyperloop will see maglev lines running in partially elevated tubes or tunnels along which streamlined, engineless trains will travel at speeds of 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 km/h, according to Mao Kai, chief designer of the system at CASIC. So far, there is no indication of how much such a system would cost.

By comparison, China’s fastest wheeled train in commercial operation travels at about 350 km/h, while large commercial jetliners usually fly at 900 to 1,000 km/h.

The highest speed ever achieved by a railway vehicle was 603 km/h. That record was set during a test run of the Japanese L0 Series superconducting maglev in April 2015. However, the fastest operating speed of a commercial rail vehicle is 430 km/h, and was attained by the Transrapid maglev, developed in Germany, on a 30.5 km stretch of line that runs to the Pudong International Airport in Shanghai.

CASIC is the first Chinese enterprise to begin developing a hyperloop system capable of allowing trains to travel at 1,000 km/h or faster.

Depth of experience

The project will benefit from the company’s experience in systems engineering and supersonic vehicles, CASIC said in a statement. The company is the third in the world to embark on such a venture, following Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop One in the United States.

Mao said CASIC is working with more than 20 institutes at home and abroad on the project and its technicians are striving to develop key technologies, such as those required to construct elevated hyperloop tube systems.

He added that once the project has been developed sufficiently, CASIC plans to construct a short line for trial runs for the 1,000 km/h version.

The 1,000 km/h and 2,000 km/h versions of the system would be used for intercity travel, while the 4,000 km/h version would form part of a transnational ultrafast transportation network, according to Mao.

“The reason we are eager to develop a 4,000 km/h version is that we believe such a line is technologically feasible, and that it will have business potential in terms of long-distance transportation in the future,” he said. “Of course, safety and comfort will be at the top on our agenda when we develop hyperloop lines.”

The maglev train’s acceleration and deceleration within the tube would have to be relatively gradual and smooth to ensure passenger comfort, he said. Moreover, landforms and engineering considerations would determine what proportion of the line would be aboveground and how much would run underground.

Research competition

Zhai Wanming, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor of traction power at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, Sichuan province, previously told Xinhua News Agency that when trains travel at 400 km/h or faster more than 80 per cent of its traction power is used to counter air resistance. Therefore, a train can only maintain ultrafast speeds by running within a partially elevated tube, he said.

The idea of using magnetic levitation within a partial vacuum to carry people or cargo was floated by scientists many years ago. However, it gained new traction in 2012 when tech tycoon Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, announced his ambition to build a hyperloop between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop One have designed and produced prototypes and have signed agreements with several countries to conduct feasibility studies, according to media reports.

In May 2014, Southwest Jiaotong University announced that it had built the world’s first experimental elevated loop tube for technological demonstrations of a high-temperature superconducting maglev vehicle it has developed.

A senior Chinese maglev scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said vehicles reached constant speeds of 40 to 50 km/h during trial runs in the university’s loop tube that were conducted to assess the system’s overall design and resistance to vibration.

The scientist, who is close to the university’s research program, said the college plans to develop vehicles capable of running at 400 km/h in a partially elevated loop tube. He added that the institute is also in talks with provincial authorities regarding research and development of a next-generation maglev/tube system with an estimated speed of about 1,200 km/h.

With regard to the feasibility of CASIC’s hyperloop plans, the scientist said the company’s researchers will need to address a number of technical issues, including communications and equipment-cooling techniques in an elevated environment.

“Moreover, CASIC will have to pay great attention to its project’s profitability. My estimation is that the 1,000 km/h version will be economically and technically feasible,” he said.

“Of course, from a technical perspective, the 4,000 km/h model could also become a reality if the engineers are able to work out solutions to issues related to propulsion, levitation and control.”

Those points were echoed by Zhao Lin, an associate researcher at the National Laboratory for Superconductivity at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhao said any enterprise that is seriously considering investing in a hyperloop system will have to take a wealth of factors into consideration.

“For example, the ultrafast speed would generate a lot of demands on the track and the material from which the maglev system is made. In addition, the cost of constructing and maintaining a long-distance, elevated tube would be extremely high,” he said.

‘Traditional’ approach

Even before CASIC announced its hyperloop program, engineers at the State-owned railcar manufacturer CRRC Corp, the world’s largest train maker, had started developing a new-generation bullet train with an operating speed of 400 km/h, which will probably become the fastest train in service on the planet.

It will be deployed on a series of new lines the government is planning to connect nations participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, a multinational economic venture proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013.

The initiative consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt, which will link China with Europe via Central and Western Asia, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which will stretch from southern China across Southeast Asia, and even to Africa. The government estimates that the initiative could benefit approximately 4.4 billion people in 65 nations.

The axles and wheels of CRRC’s new bullet train will be designed so they can be adjusted to fit a range of track gauges used outside China.

At present, goods can only continue their journeys after they have been transferred to rolling stock with the appropriate gauges when they cross national borders, according to professor Jia Limin of Beijing Jiaotong University, who heads China’s high-speed railway innovation program, in an earlier interview with China Daily.

Experts have also been testing an ultrafast bullet train capable of travelling at about 600 km/h, but its designers have stressed that it has been built to test next-generation railway technologies rather than for commercial use.

Moreover, CRRC is designing two types of maglev－a 600 km/h high-speed version and a 200 km/h mid-speed version. The company expects to put them into service sometime around 2021, according to the designers.

At present, China operates 124,000 km of rail lines. That figure includes more than 22,000 km of high-speed track, about 60 per cent of the global total.

Every day, at least 4 million people use the nation’s high-speed trains, accounting for 50 per cent of daily user numbers on the country’s entire rail network.

    Coast guard and border guard officials said the boat was overloaded with about 100 people when it sank late Sunday in the mouth of the Naf river that separates Myanmar from Bangladesh.

Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) official Abdul Jalil told AFP 12 bodies had been recovered after an all-night rescue operation, saying “they include 10 children, an elderly woman and a man”.

Area coast guard commander Alauddin Nayan said the boat capsized near the coastal village of Galachar with nearly 100 people on board.

He said some 40 people in the boat were adult Rohingya Muslims fleeing their villages in Rakhine.

“The rest were children,” he said.

Border guard boats have rescued 13 Rohingya including three women and two children after scouring the estuary of the Naf river, Jalil said.

Since the boat capsized near the Myanmar side of the border, Jalil said many may have swum to the Rakhine coast.

The coast guard said the boat sank at around 10:00 pm (1600 GMT).

Local media quoted a survivor as saying the vessel capsized due to high waves and bad weather.

– Dangerous journey –

=====================

Nearly 520,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine state for Bangladesh since late August, many walking for days through thick jungle before making the perilous boat journey across the Naf river.

Around 150 Rohingya, many of them children, have drowned while trying to reach Bangladesh in small, rickety fishing boats that coastguards say are woefully inadequate for the rough seas.

Last week more than 60 Rohingya refugees are feared to have died after a boat carrying them from Myanmar capsized in rough weather in the Bay of Bengal just off the Bangladesh coast.

The bodies of 23 people were retrieved, but the death toll was expected to surge, with many of the dead likely to be young children too weak to swim through the churning water.

The refugee crisis erupted after Rohingya militant raids on Myanmar police posts on August 25 prompted a brutal military backlash.

The United Nations has said the army campaign could amount to “ethnic cleansing” while Myanmar military leaders have blamed the unrest on the Rohingya.

The government of Buddhist-majority Myanmar refuses to recognise the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group and considers them illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

While the worst of the violence appears to have abated, insecurity, food shortages and tensions with Buddhist neighbours are still driving thousands of Rohingya to make the arduous trek to Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has made the journey even more difficult with a clampdown on boats running refugees across the Naf river.

Authorities have destroyed at least 30 wooden fishing vessels whose captains are accused of smuggling Rohingya and illegal drugs into the country.

Gangs of boat owners, crew and fishermen have been charging the fleeing Rohingya upwards of $250 for the two-hour journey that normally costs no more than $5.//AFP

Russell Salic and two others have been charged with involvement in the plan to carry out the attacks in the name of the Islamic State group during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in 2016.

A Justice Department statement said Salic, 37, transferred money to the other suspects for the operation, saying he could safely do this from the Philippines without attracting attention.

Multiple locations including New York’s subway, Times Square and some concert venues were identified as targets in the plot that was foiled by an undercover FBI agent, US authorities announced Friday.

The agent posed as an IS supporter and communicated with Salic and his two alleged accomplices Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, a 19-year-old Canadian who purchased bombmaking materials, and Talha Haroon, a 19-year-old American citizen living in Pakistan.

El Bahnasawy told the undercover FBI agent that Salic was a trusted IS supporter who had provided funding to help the group on prior occasions, according to the Justice Department statement.

The statement quoted messages sent by Salic to others involved in the plot in which he described terror laws in the Philippines as “not strict” in comparison to countries such as Australia and the UK.

“Terrorists from all over the world usually come here as a breeding ground for terrorists… hahahaha… But no worry here in Philippines. They dont care bout IS… Only in west,” he added, according to the statement.

Salic was arrested in the Philippines around April 2017, the statement said.

It added that El Bahnasawy, who authorities say has pled guilty to “terrorism charges”, was arrested in New Jersey in May 2016 and Haroon was arrested in Pakistan around September 2016.

The extradition of Haroon and Salic to the US is pending, according to prosecutors. Philippine officials could not be contacted for comment.

US authorities said Friday that Salic had sent “approximately $423” to fund the attacks and had promised to send more.

The largely-Roman Catholic Philippines has been struggling for years with armed insurgencies arising from the Muslim minority in the country’s restive south.

Various Muslim militant groups have publicly pledged allegiance to IS in the past. Armed militants flying the black IS flag have been besieging the southern city of Marawi since May, leaving at least 955 people dead.

The fighting, which is still raging despite the Philippine military using artillery, airstrikes and US military assistance, has left the once-thriving city in ruins with thousands of civilians displaced.

Police late Friday raided a building in the capital Jakarta that houses a sauna and a gym after they received information from the public that it was being used for prostitution.

“We secured 51 and seven employees for allegedly providing pornographic services,” Jakarta Police spokesman Argo Yuwono said in a statement.

Six foreigners were among those detained, including four men from China, one from Thailand and one from Holland.

Homosexuality and gay sex are legal everywhere in Indonesia except in conservative Aceh province, but police have used the country’s tough anti-pornography laws or drugs charges to criminalise LGBT people in the past.

Yuwono said six of those detained would be charged under Indonesia’s anti-pornography law, and could face up to six years in prison.

It is not clear what — if anything — the remaining 52 would be charged with.

Friday’s raid comes at a time of growing hostility towards Indonesia’s small lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

Ministers, hardliners and influential Islamic groups have lined up to make anti-LGBT statements in public recently.

In a similar incident in May, 141 men were detained for allegedly taking part in a sex party in Jakarta promoted as “The Wild One”.

Andreas Harsono, senior Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch, condemned the arrests.

“This is part of the ongoing anti-LGBT campaign in Indonesia that has been going on since January last year,” he told AFP.

“Human Rights Watch demands police release them and not make up charges against them.”

He said the increase in discrimination towards LGBT Indonesians was related to the rise of conservative Islam.//AFP

Five of them are Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) militants who have been arranging safe passage into Malaysia for their comrades since 2015.

The lecturer is a 35-year-old Albanian national, a visiting lecturer at a local public university, said Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun.

“Intelligence indicates he has connections with Islamic State (IS) militants overseas. Sources said the Albanian suspect was in the midst of finalising his posting as a visiting lecturer.

“He has been in Malaysia since 2012 and even obtained a PhD from a local public university.

“Authorities checked his teaching records and discovered he had taught at various academies in the Klang Valley, including one in Kuala Lumpur from 2014 to 2015,” the source said.

Another source said the lecturer was also suspected of having contacts with a IS facilitator in Turkey, who is in charge of arranging safe passage for IS militants into Syria through Turkey.

As for the former Internal Secu­rity Act detainee, the 53-year-old man was believed to have been recruiting inmates in Tapah Prison.

Police said he planned to launch attacks at houses of worship belonging to Muslims, Christians and Hin­dus.

“His aim was to incite religious and race conflicts in the country,” said Mohamad Fuzi, adding that the suspect was also protecting one of Tand­zim Al-Qaeda Malaysia (TAQM) mi­­li­­tants.

The former detainee was arrested along with a 37-year-old man suspected of recruiting two Malay­sians to join TAQM.

“Both suspects were detained on Oct 6,” he said.

It is learnt that they were earlier sentenced to seven years imprisonment in January 2016, but were ordered to serve the jail term from the date of arrest on February 7, 2013.

They were released on parole on Friday.

However, they were re-arrested upon release at Tapah Prison under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota).

Sources said the former detainee was also actively recruiting inmates to join IS and he is also suspected of withholding information on those planning to launch lone wolf attacks in Malaysia.

On the five ASG militants, authorities believe they bribed officials on duty at the country’s border in Sabah to secure travels for militants to Sandakan, and eventually Kuala Lumpur.

“They also used ‘agents’ in Sabah, including in Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu, to enable those from ASG to travel without valid documents,” a source told Sunday Star yesterday.

The sources said the five ASG suspects are two Malaysians, two Filipinos and a Filipino with a Ma­­laysian permanent resident status. It is also learnt that the suspects’ family members helped the ASG militants to move about in the country.

Mohamad Fuzi said the five suspects were arrested in Sandakan, Sabah, by the Counter Terrorism Division on Sept 27. “It is a follow-up to the arrests of ASG militants on Sept 14 in Kuala Lumpur,” he said.