JAKARTA - Indonesian counter-terrorism forces killed a man
believed to have been one of the masterminds of the 2002 Bali
bombings on Tuesday during a raid in the capital Jakarta, police
and reports said.
The man was among three people killed in two raids on the
city's outskirts.
Police did not disclose the identities of the three, saying "a
forensic examination was still being carried out".
But a police source told AFP one was believed to be Dulmatin, a
leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant group and an
Al-Qaeda-trained bomb-making specialist for whom Washington is
offering a 10-million-US-dollar bounty.
It is not the first report of his death. In 2008, Philippine
military officials said they believed Dulmatin's body had been
exhumed on the island of Tawi-tawi.
The security ministry's counter-terrorism chief, Ansyaad Mbai, told
AFP that "if it's true that it's him, we will be very grateful that
the most wanted terrorist has been killed in Pamulang. It will be a
big relief to us."
At a news conference, national police spokesman Edward Aritonang
said that one of the three was killed in a gunfight with
counter-terrorism police at an Internet cafe in Pamulang city west
of the capital.
Witnesses saw a body bag taken from the cafe into an ambulance
following the gunfight. In a later raid a few kilometres from the
first incident two other people on a motorcycle were shot dead, an
AFP photographer witnessed.
Police confirmed that the operation was linked to a
counter-terrorism raid in Aceh province in which a militant
training facility was discovered. Sixteen suspects have been
arrested so far and charged under counter-terrorism laws.
The series of operations comes ahead of a planned visit by US
President Barack Obama this month.
Believed to be in his late 30s, Dulmatin is accused of helping JI
plan and carry out the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people on
the Indonesian resort island, most of them foreign tourists.
JI is a Southeast Asian extremist group inspired by Al-Qaeda. Its
ultimate goal is to unite Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore
and the southern Philippines into a fundamentalist Islamic state,
using terrorist attacks to destabilise existing governments.
The group has carried out more than 50 bombings in Indonesia since
April 1999, according to the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group, including the 2002 Bali bombings and attacks on the resort
island in 2005 that killed 20.
The last such attack killed seven people and two suicide bombers in
two luxury hotels in Jakarta last July.
Malaysian terror mastermind Noordin Mohammad Top, killed in
September 2009, allegedly organised the attacks as part of his
Al-Qaeda-inspired "holy war" on the West. He was falsely reported
to have been killed a month earlier by local media.
- AFP/ir