KUALA LUMPUR Malaysia has the threat posed by suicide bombers and other terrorists under control, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said today.

"It would be a cause of concern if we did not know where they are, but we know where they are," he told reporters when asked to comment on a police announcement this week of the arrest of a suicide bombing squad.

Mahathir said police had received information about a suicide squad from some of the more than 70 alleged Islamic militants already detained here since the middle of last year.

"These are misguided people. They feel that through democracy they cannot gain power in this country so they went to Afghanistan and Pakistan to learn how to use force to take over the government.

"They came back but they were not well prepared for this kind of thing. Very soon we detected them and knew what they were up to. So they are not going to be a threat to this country," he said.

Way ahead

Officials said Wednesday that four members of a suicide bombing squad picked up last week had been involved in a thwarted plot by the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist group to attack Western targets in neighbouring Singapore.

JI has links to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, and has been blamed for the Bali bombing on October 12 which killed more than 190 people.

Mahathir was also questioned about the Luqmanul Hakiem religious school in southern Malaysia formerly run by alleged JI spiritual leader, Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, in the wake of revelations that some of the suspects in the Bali blast attended the institution.

"We knew about it long before (the) September 11 (attacks in the United States). We have taken action. We are way ahead of the rest of the world in dealing with potential terrorists. There is nothing to fear here," he said.

The school was closed down in January this year, and a number of teachers were detained.

In detention

Bashir, who had been in self-imposed exile in Malaysia for several years during the rule of Indonesian dictator Suharto, had returned home after Suharto's fall in 1998.

He is now in detention in Indonesia on suspicion of involvement in a series of church bombings there on Christmas Eve 2000.

Bashir denies any knowledge of JI and any involvement in terrorism. AFP