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JAKARTA: They were also sifting through volumes of material gathered
from an alleged safe house in the South Sumatra provincial capital
of Palembang earlier this week, including the bombs and 18 computer
hard drives.
“We are still investigating the terror
suspects and examining all the explosives we found,” national
police spokesman Abubakar Nataprawira told Agence France-Presse.
“Our team is still studying how powerful these
bombs would have been. There are quite a lot of devices, and we’re
still working on that.”
He refused to confirm media reports that some of
the bombs found in the safe house, including 10 that were primed to
explode, were as lethal as the bombs that killed 202 people in Bali
eight years ago.
Police have given very little information about
the men who were rounded up in and around Palembang between Saturday
and Wednesday, saying only that they formed a dangerous cell linked
to some of the region’s most wanted extremists.
The cell had staked out a backpacker café in
the tourist town of Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, police said, and was
reportedly eyeing Western targets in Jakarta.
The leader, believed to be a Singaporean known
as Abu Hazam, was connected to Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad
Top, who allegedly masterminded the Bali bombings and other attacks
in Indonesia since 2002.
Noordin is the alleged chief of the most extreme
Jemaah Islamiah faction and calls himself leader of al-Qaeda for the
Malay Archipelago, a loosely defined network believed to include
extremists in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.
Abu Hazam, also known as Omar and Taslim, is
also an associate of Mas Selamat bin Kastari, the alleged leader of
Jemaah Islamiah’s Singapore branch who escaped from prison there
in February and is still at large, reportedly in Indonesia.
-- AFP
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