4th July 2008. JAKARTA (AFP) - Bombs found in a militant safe house in South Sumatra were packed with bullets to inflict maximum carnage, police said Friday as they interrogated 10 suspected Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) cell members. Police also said they were on the lookout for fugitive Singaporean terror suspect Mas Selamat bin Kastari after arresting one of his alleged associates, a Singaporean bomb expert identified only as MH, on Saturday.
"They have changed their techniques. The bombs contained not only buckshot but also bullets to give a double impact," national chief of police Sutanto said a day after authorities announced the arrest of the alleged cell."If they had exploded the bullets would have easily killed people."
Police have given very little information about the men who were rounded up in and around Palembang between Saturday and Wednesday, saying only that they formed a dangerous cell linked to some of the region's most wanted extremists. Investigators were sifting through mountains of material gathered from the alleged safe house in the South Sumatra provincial capital, including some 20 makeshift bombs, detonators, explosives chemicals and 18 computer hard drives.
They said the cell's senior bomb-maker was the Singaporean believed to be Mohammed Hassan, alias Abu Hamza, who was the subject of a "red note" from the Singaporean government warning of his alleged terrorist activities. He was connected to fugitive Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad Top, Indonesia's most wanted man, as well as Kastari, the alleged JI leader in Singapore who escaped from prison there in February and is still at large. Noordin calls himself leader of Al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago and is seen as the head of the most extreme faction of the regional JI network, which aims to create an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia.
JI has militant members in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and southern Thailand, but Noordin is considered the leader most set on attacking Westerners. He allegedly masterminded the 2002 Bali bombings which killed more than 200 people, mostly foreigners, as well as the 2003 Marriott Hotel attack in Jakarta and the Australian embassy attack here in 2004. The Palembang cell had staked out a backpacker cafe in the tourist town of Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, police said, and was reportedly eyeing Western targets in Jakarta.
Police refused to confirm reports that Kastari had entered Indonesia after his dramatic February 27 escape through a toilet window in a detention centre in Singapore. But they said they would post "Wanted" notices with Kastari's picture throughout the massive archipelago. "We don't need to say anything. It's still under investigation. We're afraid that if we mention it he'll escape," Sutanto said. The Singaporean government accuses Kastari of plotting to hijack a plane in order to crash it into Singapore's Changi Airport in 2001.
The Singaporean suspect in custody will be prosecuted in Indonesia before Jakarta considered any extradition request from Singapore, police said. They said the bomb expert had received military training in Afghanistan, but there was no confirmation of local media reports that he had met Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Sutanto said he had been a student of Azahari Husin, JI's bomb-making emir and close ally of Noordin who was killed during a police raid in Java in 2005.
Analysts said the police would be hoping to find a "treasure trove" of intelligence on Noordin and the JI network from the suspects and the computer hard drives. But Singapore-based expert Dr. John Harrison said such arrests only "bought time" for the authorities and sooner or later Indonesia would have to confront the radicals' violent ideology. Indonesia has captured or killed around 300 suspected members of JI, which grew out of religious schools in Java in the 1990s, in the past six years.
