http://www.smh.com.au/world/terrorists-on-rampage-despite-lacking-ability-and-leadership-20110927-1kvd2.html Terrorists on rampage, despite lacking ability and leadership Tom Allard September 28, 2011 Dead … Inspector-General Alam shows images of Hayat. Photo: AP
JAKARTA: A suicide bombing in a Central Javan church and the discovery of four homemade bombs in Ambon in the past week have highlighted a proliferation of new, highly motivated but unskilled extremist cells in Indonesia. The recent spate of bombings - successful and foiled - shows how far authorities have come in tackling the mass-casualty terrorism that plagued the nation between 2002 and 2009, some analysts say. Indonesian police announced yesterday that Pino Damayanto, also known as Ahmad Yusefa Hayat, was the man who walked into the Bethel Injil Sepenuh church in Solo on Sunday and detonated a small explosive device, killing himself but no one else. Advertisement: Story continues below Hayat is an associate of Muhammad Syarief, who similarly attacked a mosque in a police compound in Cirebon, West Java in April. Hayat drove Syarief to the mosque before Syarief blew himself up. Both men, members of Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid group founded by the imprisoned radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, succeeded only in killing themselves, although dozens of people were injured. ''Detachment 88 [Indonesia's counterterrorism unit] has destroyed all of the links between the [al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in] Afghanistan and the Philippines and Indonesia,'' Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer at Indonesia's National Defence University, said. ''The new organisations don't know who to go to. They listen to Osama's speeches and read the websites but they really don't know what they are doing. They are essentially leaderless.'' A police spokesman, Inspector-General Anton Bachrul Alam, said two small bombs had been found near churches in Ambon, south Maluku, on Monday, bringing to four the number of devices uncovered since violence sparked by false rumours that a Muslim taxi driver had been tortured by Christians. Seven people died in rioting in Ambon on September 11 and hundreds of homes were damaged. General Alam said four fugitives from the cell - known to police - were being hunted. Sidney Jones, a terrorism analyst in Jakarta for the International Crisis Group, said recent attacks showed a decline in capability of terrorist groups, but not necessarily their ambition. For example, Indonesian police foiled a bold plot to blow up a large church packed with worshippers on Good Friday this year, she said. If it hadn't been disrupted, it could have caused more deaths than the Bali bombings in 2002, although Ms Jones said the bombs had been wired incorrectly. ''You could say they are low-level amateurs,'' she said. ''[But] you could not rule out another successful [mass-casualty attack] in the future.'' Ads by Google Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/terrorists-on-rampage-despite-lacking-ability-and-leadership-20110927-1kvd2.html#ixzz1ZGLv7mNT [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: [email protected] Subscribe : [email protected] Unsubscribe : [email protected] List owner : [email protected] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
