Would-be bomb attackers killed
Indonesian police shoot dead 3 who planned campaign
TANGERANG // Three militants who were planning a holiday season suicide bombing in Indonesia were killed in a shootout yesterday on the outskirts of Jakarta, police said.
It was the second attack plot to be foiled in less than two weeks.
A residential neighbourhood was evacuated after bombs were found in a house rented by the men. Police said they had found five low- explosive devices made from potassium nitrate, and had defused three so far. The men planned to stage their attack on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve, said Jakarta police chief Mochamad Iriawan. They intended to stab police officers to attract a crowd and then detonate bombs, he said. The three men were killed during a confrontation with the police’s antiterrorist squad in a residential compound in Tangerang, a satellite city of Jakarta, after refusing an appeal from authorities to surrender.
National police spokesman Rikwanto said the men threw explosives and fired guns at police. A fourth man, who was arrested in the neighbourhood, had led police to the house used by the militants.
“Every year, Christmas and New Year’s events are the target of terrorists to carry out amaliyah,” Rikwanto said, using an Arabic term that is a byword for suicide bombing in militant circles. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, has carried out a sustained c lampdown on Islamic militants since the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
But a new threat has emerged in recent years from militants who have switched allegiance to ISIL and from new recruits.
An attack in Jakarta by ISIL sympathisers in January killed eight people, including the attackers.
Police said the holiday season plot was uncovered during the interrogation of militants arrested on December 10 who were planning a suicide bomb attack on a guard-changing ceremony at the presidential palace in Jakarta the next day.
That plot, in which a woman was to be the suicide bomber, was orchestrated by Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian fighting with ISIL in Syria, police said.
They also said Naim was behind a bomb - making factory that was raided last month in West Java and contained enough explosive materials to make bombs three times more powerful than those used in the Bali bombings.
Awi Setiyono, a police spokesman, said that one of the militants killed yesterday – who he named as Omen – was a convicted murderer who was radicalised in prison by a militant who had plotted an attack against the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta in 2013.
The two other men killed were members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, an extremist group led by radical cleric Aman Abdurrahman.
The antiterrorist squad also arrested a suspected militant in North Sumatra’s Deli Serdang district yesterday and another in Payakumbuh, a town in the neighbouring province of West Sumatra.
Police said they were linked to radicals who were arrested in August in connection with plans to fire a rocket at Singapore from the nearby Indonesian island of Batam.