Police have detained two al-Qaeda-linked Indonesians and a Malaysian who were allegedly training militants to mount car bomb attacks in the Philippines, an official said today.

Police named the detained suspects as Ted Yolanda of Malaysia and Indonesians Mohamad Nasir Hamid and Mohamad Yusuf Karin alias Pais.

The three are members of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a Southeast Asia-based proxy of the Abu Sayyaf behind the October 2002 Bali bomb blasts that claimed about 200 lives, said Chief Superintendent Ismael Rafanan, intelligence chief of the Philippines police.

They were arrested as they stepped off into the port of Zamboanga in late 2004, with the help of foreign governments that tipped off Manila about the suspects' movements, he told reporters.

Rafanan said the group were headed for a known JI training base in the Mount Kararao region of the main southern island of Mindanao.

"They were preparing to go into car bombs," Rafanan said. "They have reached that level of sophistication. They are ready to do it."

Targets not identified

He declined to identify the targets, saying only that they planned to "train people to do that."

He suggested that the car-bomb trainees would be foreign militants, saying "Filipinos at this point are not yet ready."

Western intelligence agencies had previously warned that Mindanao camps, some run by radical members of Muslim separatist guerrilla groups operating on the island, were providing sanctuary and training facilities for al-Qaeda-linked militants.

Rafanan said the authorities seized guns, explosives, and training manuals from the detained suspects.

The three were arrested before a series of bomb blasts in Manila and two Mindanao cities that 12 people on Valentine's Day.

The military last week arrested two members of the Abu Sayyaf - another al-Qaeda-linked militant group based in the southern Philippines - for the bombing of a bus in Manila's financial district on Feb 14, when two other bombs ripped through a bus depot and a shopping mall on Mindanao.

The Abu Sayyaf, a group on the US State Department's "foreign terrorist organization" blacklist, claimed the blasts within an hour after they occurred.

National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Leopoldo Bataoil earlier said the authorities have arrested two other suspects for the Mindanao blasts. It was not known if he was referring to two of the three foreign detainees.