Indonesian police have arrested a man believed to be a Saudi national and a local man suspected of involvement in arranging funding for last month’s suicide attacks on Jakarta hotels, police said yesterday.
Authorities are trying to pin down whether the bombings at the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels may have received overseas funding from al-Qaeda, as has been the case in attacks in the past, a police source said.
National police spokesman Nanan Soekarna told a news conference that the two men, who he identified only as Ali and Iwan, had been arrested recently in different areas of West Java.
“The police are investigating Ali and Iwan’s involvement, their links to another country in terms of funding,” Soekarna said.
Ali is believed to be a Saudi, but police were still crosschecking his identity, Soekarna said.
“We suspect he is a Saudi Arabian citizen, but we still need to prove whether his citizenship is fake or not,” he said.
Soekarna declined to comment on whether al-Qaeda could be involved.
An Indonesian court in 2004 revealed that there had been a flow of cash funneled from al-Qaeda’s No. 2 at the time, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, via Indonesian students studying in Pakistan to fund an earlier attack on Jakarta’s JW Marriot hotel in 2003.
Media reports quoting police sources have said that authorities believed that funds for last month’s hotel bombings might have been brought into Indonesia from the Middle East by couriers in June.
The police source said that they were investigating whether nationals from Yemen could have been involved in planning the attacks.
Last Thursday, police issued photographs of four more men believed to be involved in the July 17 hotel attacks.
They were named as Syaifudin Zuhri bin Djaelani Irsyad, Ario Sudarso, Mohamad Syahrir and Bagus Budi Pranoto, alias Urwah.
The latter suspect was previously sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail in 2004 for harboring Malaysian-born militant Noordin Mohammad Top and his late accomplice Azhari Husin, Soekarna said.
Top, who formed a violent wing of the Jemaah Islamiah militant network, is believed to be the mastermind behind last month’s attacks that killed nine people and wounded 53.
Since the bombings, police have arrested at least five people, and three others died during raids, but hopes that they had killed Top during a raid in Central Java proved misplaced.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS