Top rated terror suspect mastermind of attacks

“He was the armed forces commander of Jemaah Islamiyah,” Nationwide Police spokesperson Ahmad Ramadhan stated at a information convention in the cash, Jakarta. “He’s been on the law enforcement preferred checklist for 18 decades.”

Zulkarnaen, a biologist who was amid the 1st Indonesian militants to go to Afghanistan in the 1980s for education, was an teacher at a armed forces academy there for seven yrs, Ramadhan explained.

Due to the fact May 2005, Zulkarnaen has been stated on an al-Qaida sanctions checklist by the U.N. Protection Council for remaining connected with Osama bin Laden or the Taliban.

The Protection Council reported that Zulkarnaen, who became an pro in sabotage, was a person of al-Qaida’s representatives in Southeast Asia and just one of the couple individuals in Indonesia who experienced experienced immediate get hold of with bin Laden’s community.

It mentioned that Zulkarnaen led a squad of fighters recognized as the Laskar Khos, or Unique Force, whose users have been recruited from among the some 300 Indonesians who trained in Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Zulkarnaen was appointed the head of Camp Saddah, a navy academy in the southern Philippines recognized for fighters from Southeast Asia, the Security Council reported. He used a ten years at the camp coaching other Jemaah Islamiyah users.

He became operations chief for Jemaah Islamiyah following the arrest of his predecessor, Encep Nurjaman, also identified as Hambali, in Thailand in 2003.

The United States’ “Rewards for Justice” method had made available a bounty of up to $5 million for his seize. He was the only Indonesian on the checklist.

Indonesian police mentioned he masterminded church attacks that transpired simultaneously in numerous Indonesian areas through Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 2000 that killed a lot more than 20 people today.

Ramadhan claimed Zulkarnaen is suspected of currently being included in the making of bombs utilised in a collection of assaults, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 folks, typically overseas tourists, and a 2003 attack on the J.W. Marriott Lodge in Jakarta that killed 12.

Zulkarnaen was also the mastermind of a bomb assault on the formal residence of the Philippine ambassador in Jakarta in 2000 that killed two persons, a 2004 suicide assault exterior the Australian Embassy that killed nine, and a 2005 bombing in Bali that killed 20, Ramadhan claimed.

He said Zulkarnaen was also the architect of sectarian conflict in Ambon and Poso from 1998 to 2000.

Conflicts involving Christians and Muslisms in Ambon, the provincial cash of the Molluca islands, remaining a lot more than 5,000 men and women lifeless and 50 % a million displaced. The Muslim-Christian conflict in Poso, recognized as a hotbed of Islamic militancy on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, killed at least 1,000 people today from 1998 to 2002.

Law enforcement earlier said they were being tipped off to Zulkarnaen’s spot in raids after interrogating a number of suspected militants arrested late very last thirty day period.

Zulkarnaen is also accused of harboring Upik Lawanga, a different bomb maker and a vital Jemaah Islamiyah’ member. Lawanga was arrested by counterterrorism law enforcement in Lampung late previous thirty day period. He had eluded seize since 2005 right after being named as a suspect in an assault that killed more than 20 men and women at a market in Poso.

A courtroom banned Jemaah Islamiyah in 2008, and the group was weakened by a sustained crackdown on militants by Indonesia’s counterterrorism police with U.S. and Australian support. A new threat has emerged in new a long time impressed by Islamic Condition group attacks abroad.

Indonesia’s final big militant assault was in May perhaps 2018, when two people carried out suicide bombings in the country’s 2nd-biggest city, Surabaya, killing a dozen folks, together with two youthful women whose moms and dads had associated them in just one of the assaults. Law enforcement claimed the father of the ladies was the leader of a militant Jemaah Anshorut Daulah cell who pledged allegiance to Islamic Point out group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.