Ticking Time Bombs; Filipino authorities say the newest threat to the country is a shadowy terror group made up of radical Muslim converts.

Byline: Joe Cochrane, With Marites Vitug in Manila

Wally Villanueva does not look all that different from anyone else walking the streets of Manila. So the lean, thirtysomething Filipino didn't turn any heads as he walked into the National Security Council building last week--at least until they heard what he had to say. Villanueva calmly entered the office of Norberto Gonzales, national-security adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and in the presence of a NEWSWEEK reporter, surrendered himself.

The nondescript young man, it turns out, was a radical Muslim convert, one of dozens wanted on an arrest warrant in connection to deadly terrorist attacks and recently planned bombings in the Philippines. Filipino authorities hope his ongoing interrogation will reveal the whereabouts of other converts believed to be lurking in Manila, waiting to strike. "This is a bigger threat [than past terrorist plots]," says one official from the government's new antiterrorism task force. "Muslim converts are now one of the strategies that [terrorist groups] like to employ."

For years the Filipino government has been able to put a name and face on its Islamic terrorist problem. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, has been fighting for an independent state on the southern island of Mindanao for more than two decades; its leaders are currently engaged in peace talks with Manila. Abu Sayyaf, which dates back to the early 1990s, has promoted its goal of a Muslim state through repeated terrorist attacks and kidnappings. But a previously little-known Islamic group called the Rajah Solaiman Movement, whose membership consists of Filipino Christians who have converted to Islam, is now one of the top worries for the country's intelligence services.

Filipino authorities say the group's members have been trained, financed and directed by Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, for at least two years. They claim the movement has dispatched dozens of its operatives to Manila to plan and carry out terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials say that most of the movement's members had worked as overseas laborers in the Middle East, where they converted. Called "balik Islam"--or those who've reverted to Islam--the converts are not limited by geography. Authorities fear they could spread the violence that has plagued the south to the country's urban centers.

In recent weeks at least three Muslim converts have been arrested along with Abu Sayyaf members for plotting large-scale bombings of rail lines, shopping malls, state buildings and foreign embassies in Manila. One arrested convert confessed, according to authorities, to detonating a bomb on a passenger ferry after it left a Manila port in February, killing 116 people. And on May 1 police thwarted another bombing outside the Committee on Elections office in central Manila. Officers found two men, one of whom is a suspected member of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, inside a van holding a ...