Militants poised to strike in Indonesia - Paper ( 2003-09-28 16:29) (Agencies)
A new generation of Muslim
militants from the Jemaah Islamiah group is plotting suicide attacks on
international hotels and expatriate neighborhoods in Indonesia in December,
Singapore's The Sunday Times said.
The newspaper, citing unidentified Indonesian intelligence sources, said 12
Jemaah Islamiah members drawn from six cells planned to turn the festive season
in Indonesia into a bloody nightmare.
"International hotels in Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan were picked as one set
of targets," the newspaper said. Surabaya is a big city on Java island. Medan is
on Sumatra.
"The other comprised residential areas with large expatriate communities," it
said.
The Jemaah Islamiah has been blamed for the bomb attacks on Bali island in
October last year in which 202 people were killed, and for an August blast at
luxury hotel in Jakarta that killed 12 people.
The group is seen by some intelligence experts as the southeast Asian wing of
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group.
Jemaah Islamiah's operations chief, an Indonesian known as Hambali, was
arrested by Thai and U.S. agents in Thailand in August but The Sunday Times said
the new generation of "twenty-something" militants was every bit as "fanatically
anti-American" as Hambali.
"Ideologically, the newcomers are no different from their predecessors. They
are just as hardline," the paper quoted a senior Indonesian intelligence source
as saying.
Indonesian police said last week the man accused of designing the bombs that
rocked Bali and the Jakarta hotel was planning to strike again in Jakarta.
Azahari, a 46-year-old British-educated Malaysian engineer accused by
authorities in several countries of being the top bomb-maker for the Jemaah
Islamiah network, is still on the run and one of the most wanted men in Asia.
