Article

2007-06-15 Southeast Asia

Indonesian authorities have landed another stinging blow to regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI), announcing that they had nabbed the de facto head of the shadowy organisation. Zarkasih - who has several aliases including Nuaim and Mbah and has headed JI since 2005 - was captured in Yogyakarta in central Java six hours after Indonesia's elite anti-terror squad Detachment 88 arrested the country's most-wanted Islamic militant, JI military wing chief Abu Dujana, on Saturday.

Both men appeared in video confessions on Friday admitting their involvement in the secretive group, which has been blamed for a string of terrorist attacks in Indonesia including the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians. Authorities delayed revealing the arrests to exploit information gleaned as they hunted other top terror suspects, including Bali bombings mastermind Noordin M Top.

But Detachment 88 head Suryadarma Salim said Dujana was refusing to give up the location of the terror leader, whom he is accused of protecting after the Bali blasts. "Even though (Dujana and Noordin) are in different structures, Dujana will not betray him by revealing his whereabouts," he said.

Terrorism analyst Sidney Jones, of the International Crisis Group, said the arrest of Zarkasih was a significant blow for JI, which has undergone significant restructuring in recent years. "He became the de facto head sometime after 2004 when there was a restructuring of JI," Jones said. "This is as big if not bigger than Abu Dujana."

Jones said Indonesian authorities may have been "trying to deflect attention from the fact they got the number one head" by naming Dujana as their most-wanted terrorist. "Obviously if the network was going to be somewhat weakened by catching one (leader), it's going to be even more weakened by catching two. I think we have to look beyond the leaders and to look at the base (of JI), but I think this is going to be a major spanner in the works for JI."

Brigadier General Salim said Zarkasih, who trained in Afghanistan, was appointed emergency head of JI during a meeting of high ranking JI leaders in 2005 after the previous leader was caught in June 2004. "Zarkasih's duty was to control the activities and operations of JI in Indonesia," he said.

In the videotape confession, Zarkasih also told authorities Abu Bakar Bashir lead the terrorist network between 2000 and 2002, before being replaced by Abu Rusdan. He said JI experienced a "vacuum of power" during 2004, when he was elevated as de facto head and also charged with finding a new emir to lead the organisation. "This effort is very difficult because we are trying to find a credible emir," Zarkasih said.

"The rest of the group appointed me as the head of the commission (to find a new leader) - I don't know whether that is as emir or not. But we have to find a good emir to lead the spread of Islam teachings and jihad."

Salim said the leader had fought in Afghanistan in the 1990s and studied in Pakistan. He said the anti-terror operation was continuing to hunt other unnamed high-ranking terror suspects, including three men who headed up the organisation's education, preaching and logistics arms.

"Our team is all over Java and eastern Indonesia," he said. "The Jemaah Islamiah network still exists. They are building their power by recruiting ... and holding military training sessions and also collecting guns, ammunitions, explosives and ready-to-use bombs."

Salim also said Dujana had been planning to assassinate the head of a central Java university, and that his military wing was partly-funded by the theft of the equivalent of $A66,000 from the provincial government in Poso, Sulawesi.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's vice president Jusuf Kalla said Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had been "a little bit inappropriate" talking about the arrest of Dujana two days before it was made public.

Posted by ryuge 2007-06-15 07:03|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

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