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.
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