The police have potentially foiled a future terror attack with the weekend arrest of the suspected aide of the country's most-wanted militant, along several other suspects, a police spokesman said Monday.
On Saturday, Indonesia's secretive anti-terror unit captured a man named Mahfud but also known as Yusron, who police said was an aide of Abu Dujana, thought to head a splinter group of Southeast Asian militant group Jamaah Islamiyah.
Police said several others had also been detained but not been identified and that it was possible Dujana, Indonesia's most wanted fugitive, was among them.
Dujana is wanted in connection with several bomb attacks, including the 2004 Australian embassy blast and a car bombing at the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta a year earlier.
"Based on our observation and investigation they had plans to carry out a terror attack... We foiled the plan and we have captured several men, but we are far from over," National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Sisno Adiwinoto said, as quoted by Reuters.
"Police are still chasing wanted terror suspects and conducting further investigations on the ground."
Sisno declined to disclose the target of the terror attack, but police planned to expand their search operation beyond Java in search of Dujana.
He said Yusron was being questioned, but police still did not know his role in the organization.
Sisno said that besides Yusron, the police had also arrested four others within two days for their alleged involvement in the terrorist acts.
"We arrested more than three people," Sisno was quoted by Detikcom news portal as saying. The four were, according to the news portal, Sigit, Adi Saputro, Suharyanto and Aris Widodo.
Sigit was arrested in Sleman, Yogyakarta, on Saturday together with Suharyanto and Adi, while Aris was captured in Karanganyar, Central Java, on Sunday.
Maj. Gen. Ansyaad Mbai, the top anti-terror official at the Coordinating Ministry for Security and Political Affairs, said the police were keeping much of the information about the arrests to themselves.
However, senior officers had told him "they had made a significant breakthrough", according to AP.
Jamaah Islamiyah is a loose network of Islamic radicals that emerged in Indonesia in the chaos that followed the downfall of former dictator Soeharto in 1998.
Its members have since been implicated in a series of deadly attacks, including 2002 bombings on the tourist island of Bali that killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists, and three other strikes on Western targets, the most recent in 2005. The group has also been blamed for attacks in the Philippines, while Malaysia and Singapore have arrested several dozen alleged members in recent years.
Scores of arrests and raids since 2002 have severely weakened the group, analysts say, and it is now splintered into several cells, not all of which agree that bombing soft targets is permissible.
Source : www.thejakartapost.com
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