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JAKARTA: A body exhumed by the Philippine military
this week was
unlikely to be an Islamic militant wanted over the 2002 Bali
bombings, a regional terror expert said in Indonesia on Wednesday.
Philippines military officials
said Tuesday that the body of militant Dulmatin was thought to have
been recovered from a shallow grave on the island of Tawi-Tawi.
Officials from the Marines on Wednesday even continued to insist
that Dulmatin’s body was the one exhumed.
But Sidney Jones, a terrorism
expert with the Brussels-based think-tank the International Crisis
Group, said she believed that if he were truly dead, sources in
Indonesia would have already heard about it.
“We are pretty sure that
Dulmatin is not dead, despite the fact that the Philippine military
announced about eight times that he is,” she said, referring to
repeated erroneous reports he has been captured or killed.
“I think that we would have
heard from other sources if Dulmatin had in fact been seriously
wounded or killed. He was wounded at one stage, but there’s no
other reporting coming in from people in Indonesia,” she said.
“I just think we would have
heard more if the body that they uncovered is really his,” Jones
added, speaking at a panel discussion on terrorism.
Philippines officials said tissue
from the exhumed body will be compared with samples taken from
Dulmatin’s children to establish if it was him.
Indonesian officials have
expressed skepticism that the body was Dulmatin’s, though the
Indonesian police chief said Wednesday that police in the
Philippines had asked for Indonesian help to clarify.
“We will work with authorities
in the Philippines and will make an effort to check the identity,”
he told reporters.
The US government has offered a
$10-million bounty for Dulmatin, who was once a senior figure in the
Jemaah Islamiah (JI) movement and is believed to have been hiding in
Mindanao for most of the past five years.
He was earlier reported to have
been wounded in a clash with government troops in the region on
January 31.
He is accused of helping Jemaah
Islamiah plan and carry out the 2002 bombings in Bali that left 202
people dead.
Terrorism expert Jones said
Dulmatin’s group in the Philippines was “basically not even
considered JI any longer by many of the JI members here in
Indonesia.”
JI was previously said to have
links to al-Qaeda, but security analysts now believe the
organization is isolated.
--AFP
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