Bali Suicide Bombers Said to Have Belonged to Small Gang - New York Times

Bali Suicide Bombers Said to Have Belonged to Small Gang - New York Times: "small group with no prior criminal record or link to a large organization like Al Qaeda,"


October 7, 2005
Bali Suicide Bombers Said to Have Belonged to Small Gang
By RAYMOND BONNER
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 6 - Indonesia's counterterrorism forces say the suspected suicide bombers who carried out the attack in Bali last Saturday appear to have been a small group with no prior criminal record or link to a large organization like Al Qaeda, giving the case echoes of the London subway bombings in July.
A senior Indonesian counterterrorism official said Thursday in an interview that the bombers seemed to have been "jihadists" without previous involvement in terrorist acts that would have brought them to the attention of the authorities.
A former senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the radical Islamic organization here, who has defected and is helping the government, said he did not recognize any of the men, the official said. The heads of the presumed bombers were severed in the blast, and pictures of them have appeared on television and in newspapers. The official spoke on condition that he not be identified, because he is not the authorized spokesman for his agency.
The Bali attack, which in addition to the 3 bombers killed 19 people, most of them Indonesians, in separate explosions at three restaurants, seems indicative of the way in which terrorism is shifting, terrorism experts say.
It was less sophisticated, complex, costly and deadly than the terrorist operation in Bali three years ago, in which a van loaded with explosives exploded in front of a nightclub, killing 202 people. And the organizations that financed the earlier attack, Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, have been severely weakened.
Yet the terrorist threat remains, while presenting a different challenge from when Al Qaeda provided training, financing and direction.
"Outside of the Middle East and North Africa, this is the first time we have seen suicide bombers walk into a restaurant and blow themselves up à la Israel," said a senior Western official who has closely monitored terrorist groups and activities for the last four years.
"It is only a matter of time before what you saw in Bali on Saturday night happens in a Western country," he said. The official spoke on condition that his name and country not be used, a condition imposed by most individuals of his position with access to intelligence information.
The threads between the London, Madrid and Bali attacks are not organizational, he said: "They are threads of the mind."
The terrorists have a common world view, a shared ideology. There is no evidence of outside direction, he said, and that makes fighting them challenging in a different way. He argued further that small attacks could add up to a devastation equal in some ways to large, catastrophic ones by eating away at people's security and at the economy.
These attacks should be seen less as a change in tactics than "a demonstration of another capability," said a security adviser with experience in the public and private sectors. He declined to be identified, in part for security reasons and because he has close ties to Western law enforcement agencies that would not be as willing to share information with him if they knew he talked to reporters.
In the London bombings it is not clear who may have been behind the bombers. Here, the main suspects as the masterminds are Azhari Husin, a skilled bomb-maker, and Mohamad Noordin Top, a charismatic recruiter and fund-raiser, who are thought to be operating on their own.
In that sense, their personal terrorist trajectories mirror the evolution of terrorism. They began as members of Jemaah Islamiyah and acted on direction from Al Qaeda, but officials here and elsewhere say they now form ad hoc groups to carry out attacks.
They have a large pool of men to recruit from. Thousands of young Indonesian men have been indoctrinated at religious schools in hatred of the West and of Jews. Some 300 Indonesian men trained in Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban, and another 300 or so have trained at Jemaah Islamiyah camps in the Philippines. Training continues at the Philippine camps, but on a smaller scale, the officials say.
As a teenager, Mr. Azhari, who was born in Malaysia, went to Australia and studied at Adelaide University, where he showed a greater interest in motorbikes, sports and partying than in studying, Sally Neighbour wrote in "In the Shadow of Swords" (HarperCollins, 2004), a compelling account of the Southeast Asian terror network and the first Bali bombing.
He earned a doctorate from Reading University in England and then returned to Malaysia, where he became a university professor and acquired a reputation as an "irrepressible joker," Ms. Neighbour wrote.
Along the way, Mr. Azhari became a convert to fundamentalist Islam. He fell in with Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, who was then in exile in Malaysia, and Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was Al Qaeda's senior operative in Southeast Asia. Mr. Noordin was part of the group.
In February 2002, Mr. Azhari and Mr. Noordin met with Hambali in Bangkok and are said to have decided to go after "soft targets," resulting in the first Bali attack. They were financed by Al Qaeda, and Mr. Bashir endorsed the attack, according to one of the men who carried it out and was later captured.
The next big Azhari-Noordin operation is said to have been the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003, financed by Hambali and Al Qaeda. In the weeks before the Marriott bombing, Mr. Azhari sat in the lobby sketching the layout, according to the Indonesian police.
Days after the attack, Hambali was captured in a C.I.A. operation in Bangkok and is now in C.I.A. custody at a secret site. Mr. Bashir has been arrested and is in jail in Indonesia.
Jemaah Islamiyah is a shadow of what it once was, officials and experts say. "Its leadership has been decimated, it is strapped for cash and it is riven by internal dissension," said Sidney Jones, who has written extensively about the organization for the International Crisis Group. The main faction of the organization does not agree with violent terrorist acts, Ms. Jones said.
Mr. Azhari and Mr. Noordin have split off and continue to operate. In September 2004, their target was the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, according to the Indonesian police.
In making a recruiting pitch to a Muslim radical to take part in the bombing, Mr. Noordin boasted that he was "the most wanted man in Southeast Asia," Ms. Jones said.
Mr. Azhari drove the bomb-laden vehicle within a few hundred yards of the embassy, the police have said, then got out and hopped on a motorcycle, looking over his shoulder as the bomb went off.
Reward Offered in 2002 Bombings
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 (Reuters) - The United States offered a $10 million reward on Thursday for a major suspect in the 2002 Bali bombings, the second-highest bounty Washington is promising in its effort to stem terrorism.
The reward for a tip that could help kill or capture Dulmatin, an Indonesian militant believed to be hiding in the Philippines, is exceeded only by the $25 million offered for Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.