By James hookway and Yuyu Yuniar
Indonesian police said they killed Southeast Asia’s most-wanted terrorist during a dramatic raid, in what could be a major victory for the government’s fight against Islamic extremists.
The announcement marked the second time in as many months that Indonesian officials claimed to have killed Noordin Mohamed Top, who police say was the mastermind behind July’s suicide bombings of the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta. Those attacks killed nine people, including the bombers.
This time, authorities said in a televised press conference that fingerprint tests had positively confirmed that the man they killed was Mr. Noordin. After a similar raid in August, antiterrorism officials said privately they thought they had killed Mr. Noordin, but top police officials declined to confirm the result and later said he had eluded them.
Police are performing DNA tests for a final confirmation. If the tests check out, security analysts believe the killing will send a strong signal that Indonesia is regaining control over domestic terrorist threats after a series of recent missteps.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono described Mr. Noordin’s apparent death as “an important step in the context of successfully overcoming terrorism.” He added that “this does not mean that all organized cells working in Indonesia have been stopped, so we must continue to be vigilant and take optimal preventative steps to continue teaching terrorist leaders a lesson.”
Mr. Noordin achieved near-legendary status across Southeast Asia after applying his bomb-making and organizational skills to a spree of attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, investigators say.
Mr. Noordin was also adept at creating his own deadly networks capable of operating independently of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesia-based Islamist group where he first made his name as a terrorist. In doing so, the 41-year-old Malaysian native represented a new kind of threat for the region: a terrorist capable of working across borders to strike against allies of the U.S. and undermine moderate Muslim governments.
Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on al Qaeda and head of a terrorism research institute at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, says Mr. Noordin personified the al Qaeda ideal of being able to strike anywhere, anytime, and may have left a string of fledgling terrorist cells across Indonesia.
“He represented the highest degree of threat, not just in Indonesia, but also in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, where he kept close contact with other terrorists,” Mr. Gunaratna said.
Economists and stock-market analysts applauded the news of Mr. Noordin’s apparent death. The Jakarta blasts at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels on July 17 ended a run of nearly four years without a terrorist strike in Indonesia, and rocked confidence in the world’s most populous Muslim country.
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WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview yesterday as president, part of his drive to repair relations with the Muslim world.“I have Muslim members of my family,” he said in an interview with Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based Arab television channel. “I have lived in Muslim countries.”Although his Muslim background has been a subject he carefully avoided during his campaign (a pragmatic response to the attacks during his campaign that sought to exploit anti-Muslim sentiments), the president insisted “that the Americans are not your enemy.”
