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| Southeast Asia |
| Indonesia says US allows it to question ‘al-Qaeda suspect' |
| 2002-09-30 |
| Indonesia's Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Monday that Jakarta has obtained approval from the United States for a joint questioning of an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative arrested in Indonesia but now detained in Afghanistan. "Politically, we would like to say that Indonesia's interest in the questioning of Omar al-Faruq is very crucial and the US government has agreed with this request," Yudhoyono told reporters as quoted by AFP. Finally got around to wondering if there was anything to it, huh? Yudhoyono gave no details of the composition of the interrogation team or their itinerary. However, he asserted that questioning al-Faruq would "help us in making sure whether al-Faruq's statement (to US officials) was true, half-true or even modified." Time magazine reported in its issue dated Sept. 23 that al-Faruq, 31, had admitted to being al-Qaeda's senior representative in the region. That'd make him a fairly important personage in the al-Qaeda scheme of things... The report, greeted with skepticism here, said al-Faruq had lived near Jakarta until government agents arrested him in June and deported him to a US-held air base in Afghanistan. And now he lives in a shipping crate labeled "long-term storage." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |