Indonesian police said yesterday they had cracked a terrorist cell linked to some of the region’s most wanted fugitives after the arrest of 10 suspects with a cache of powerful homemade bombs.
Police said the cell was connected to Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad Top, a hardline leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) Islamist group who is wanted for allegedly masterminding the 2002 Bali attacks.
One of them was a bombmaker who reportedly met al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and is associated with Mas Selamat bin Kastari, the suspected leader of JI’s Singapore branch who escaped from prison there on Feb. 27.
They were arrested earlier this week in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra Province, where US and Australian-trained anti-terror police also found a cache of more than 20 bombs hidden in the attic of a rented house.
“In Palembang we have arrested members of a terrorist network who were detained by Special Detachment 88,” police spokesman Abu Bakar Nataprawira told reporters, referring to the anti-terror squad.
“There is a relation between the Palembang group and the Central Java group, which means there is a relation between them and Noordin Top,” he said.
Top is considered a key leader of the most radical wing of JI, which has staged a series of bloody attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines, including the Bali nightclub bombings and the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta.
More than 200 people, mostly foreign tourists, died in the Bali attacks, while 12 were killed in the Marriott bombing.
Police did not confirm that the bomb expert linked to Kastari was a Singaporean, but the government in the city state said one of its citizens was among the group rounded up in Sumatra.
The Kompas daily said the suspect, identified by police only as MH, 35, had met bin Laden several times and had received training in Afghanistan. He is said to have been a student of JI bombmaker Azahari Husin, who was killed in 2005.
“The suspect gave training in assembling bombs to people in Palembang related to terrorist acts in Indonesia,” Nataprawira said, adding that he was arrested on Saturday.
The arrest of MH led to the detention of nine other suspects in Palembang and the raid on the house on Tuesday, where police discovered the bombs cache.
Seven powerful “tupperware bombs” and 20 smaller pipe bombs were found in the attic of the rented house, along with bomb-making chemicals and weapons. Sixteen of the bombs were reportedly primed to explode.
The group’s plans were not revealed but police said several of the suspects had been involved in the attempted murder of a Christian priest in West Java in 2005.
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
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