Philippine communist party founder arrested in the Netherlands

Jose Maria Sison, 68, was arrested after a Dutch court judge issued an arrest warrant for him for allegedly ordering the killings from the Netherlands, the military said. Sison is on the European Union's list of terrorists.

He was taken into custody by police in The Hague and will face a court on Friday, media reports said.

''The arrest of Sison is a triumph of justice. Ironic as it is, he is assured of his day in court a right denied to the thousands of innocent victims of Communist kangaroo courts,'' Lt. Col. Bartolome Bacarro said.

A spokesman from the Netherlands' Public Prosecutor's Office was quoted by Philippine media as saying there has been no extradition request from the Philippines. He added that ordering the killings is a crime committed in the Netherlands and punishable under Dutch laws.

The armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People's Army, claimed responsibility for the slayings of two former highranking rebels in 2003 and 2004 in Manila.

Sison founded the Communist Party in 1968 and a year later the party formed the NPA.

''This is history catching up with Sison. This is the long arm of the law catching up with Sison,'' Bacarro said.

Sison is also implicated in several criminal cases in the Philippines in a series of purges in the rebel movement more than two decades ago of what the NPA perceived as military infiltrators and governmentsponsored ''deep penetrating agents'' within its ranks.

Top rebel leaders have acknowledged that some commanders killed 600 to 900 suspected spies from 1985 to 1986 in southern Mindanao.

After learning of the killings, the rebel leaders ordered regional commanders who oversaw the purges in 1988 to stop them and release detainees who were still alive.

They launched a ''rectification movement'' to acknowledge the killings as the worst blunder in the history of the Marxist insurgency in the Philippines. It was followed by the splintering of the group into various factions.

The rebels have been fighting for a Marxist state for more than three decades in an insurgency that has killed more than 40,000 people. The military estimates the number of rebels has dwindled to about 7,200 from a peak of at least 20,000 in the 1980s.

//Kyodo news