|
By Stephen Coates, Agence
France-Presse
JAKARTA: Indonesian police have
dealt another hammer blow to Southeast Asia’s most feared terror
network with raids that yielded 10 suspects and a safe house full of
bombs and computers, analysts said.
Terrorism experts told Agence
France-Presse, this week’s arrests appeared to have stopped a
dangerous cell with regional links which was poised to launch a
massive attack, probably against Western tourists on the island of
Sumatra.
Police said the men arrested
around the South Sumatra provincial capital of Palembang, were
connected to fugitive Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad Top, the
alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings who calls himself
leader of al-Qaeda for the Malay archipelago.
The arrests are likely to lead US
and Australian-trained anti-terrorism investigators to a trove of
intelligence about Noordin’s extreme faction of the Jemaah
Islamiah (JI) network and its links to Singapore and Malaysia.
“JI is fragmented and the
consensus seems to be that the group was focused on Java and had
gone back to basics” since Indonesian police began their crackdown
in 2002, said Singapore-based terrorism analyst Dr. John Harrison.
“So it’s important that there has been a fairly significant find
in South Sumatra which means that they have a bigger reach than we
had anticipated.”
Harrison, the head of the
Terrorism Unit at the International Center for Political Violence
and Terrorism Research in Singapore, said the discovery of 18
computer hard drives was a potential bonanza for investigators.
“It looks like this [cell] is
fairly significant and it could be very significant depending on
what they find on those computers. It would suggest that this was a
very large operation,” he told Agence France-Presse.
The arrests are the most
significant blow to JI, which grew out of radical religious schools
in Java island, since the capture of senior leaders Abu Dujana and
Zarkasi in June last year.
“It’s significant that it’s
in Sumatra because that is closer to the whole Mantiqi One division
in Malaysia and Singapore,” said Sidney Jones of the International
Crisis Group, referring to JI’s internal structure. “All of the
people involved in bombings have been from that network.”
Raids on a rented house in
Palembang turned up around 20 homemade bombs, including several
powerful “tupperware bombs” which police reportedly said had the
potential to cause carnage on the scale of Bali.
|
