HE was once Asia’s most-wanted, with the kind of bounty on his head that could turn a most-trusted friend into a turncoat.

This militant chieftain, whom I tracked down last year, told me rather casually when we met that: “When I shook Osama Bin Laden’s hand and pledged my allegiance to al-Qaeda, he looked me in the eye and told me to leave Malaysia unharmed for it had always upheld the sanctity of Islam”.

As I put his name (we had agreed to use the pseudonym Zain then) to his face, he began his first-ever tell-all. Well, at least the first to a non-counter-terrorism operative.

… At the International Conference on Deradicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, Rohan Gunaratna, a professor of Security Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, commended Malaysia’s tackling of terror threats.