Keeping a level head
Police: IS-linked group likely behind attack
Indonesian president urges calm after Islamic State-linked Jakarta attacks.
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s president has urged people to remain calm, a day after suspected suicide bombers killed three police officers at a Jakarta bus terminal in an attack that authorities believe is linked to the Islamic State (IS) group.
Six police officers and six civilians were also wounded in the twin blasts that were detonated five minutes apart by the two suspected attackers on Wednesday evening, police said.
The attack was the deadliest in Indonesia since January last year, when eight people were killed after suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the capital.
“We must continue to keep calm (and) keep cool because ... we Muslims are preparing to enter the month of Ramadan for fasting,” President Joko Widodo said yesterday.
Authorities in the world’s biggest Muslimmajority nation are increasingly worried about a surge in radicalism, driven in part by a new generation of militants inspired by IS.
It was “highly likely” that an IS-linked group was behind Wednesday’s attack, National Police spokesman Awi Setyono said.
“There’s a link, but we’re still studying whether it’s an international network.”
He told reporters earlier that police were investigating whether the attackers had direct orders from Syria or elsewhere.
Police have not yet named the two dead suspects but a law enforcement source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they may have been linked to Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, an umbrella organisation on a US State Department “terrorist” list that is estimated to have drawn hundreds of IS sympathisers in Indonesia.
Indonesia has suffered a series of mostly low-level attacks by IS sympathisers in the past 17 months.
Residents helped clean up splattered bloodstains and broken glass at the bus terminal in East Jakarta yesterday.
“After what happened in Manchester, in Marawi in the Philippines, maybe the cells here were triggered by the bombs and that lifted their passion to start bombing again,” Awi told television station TVOne.
He was referring to the suicide bombing that killed 22 people in a crowded concert hall in the British city of Manchester this week.
In the southern Philippines, thousands of civilians in Marawi City fled their homes this week after militants took over large parts of the city, leading to a declaration of martial law.
While most recent attacks in Indonesia have been poorly organised, authorities believe about 400 Indonesians have joined IS in Syria and could pose a more lethal threat if they came home.
Police said Wednesday’s attackers had used pressure cookers packed with explosives.
A similar type of bomb was used by a lone attacker in the Indonesian city of Bandung in February.
Authorities suspect the attacker, who was killed by police, had links to a radical network sympathetic to IS.