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, terrorism analysts said.
Terrorism experts said this week’s arrests appeared to have stopped a dangerous cell with regional links that 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 the 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 Islamiyah (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 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,” he said.
Harrison, the chief in charge 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 said.
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. “All of the people that have been 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.
The bombings at crowded tourist night-spots on the resort island of Bali eight years ago that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners, were the most deadly of a string of JI attacks blamed on Noordin’s network.
Police have mentioned a tourist cafe in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, and unspecified locations in Jakarta as targets of interest for the Pelambang cell that was broken up with a series of arrests between Saturday and Wednesday.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS