Indonesian cops re-arrest cleric

Aman nabbed over IS attack involvement

JAKARTA: A radical cleric granted an early release from prison to mark Indonesia’s Independence Day has been re-arrested for alleged involvement in several militant attacks.

Aman Abdurrahman, who has led an Islamic State group-affiliated militant network from prison, was among more than 90,000 inmates granted sentence reductions for Thursday’s national holiday.

Ibnu Chuldun, who heads the Justice Ministry’s provincial office in Central Java, said yesterday that Aman was transferred from Nusa Kambangan prison island to a paramilitary detention centre near Jakarta.

Chuldun said the cleric is being questioned about his role in attacks including a January 2016 suicide bombing in central Jakarta that killed four civilians and four attackers.

Aman was serving a nine-year sentence for helping set up a militant training camp in a remote mountainous area of Aceh in 2010.

He was released on parole in 2008 from a seven-year sentence for a failed plot that involved a bomb prematurely detonating in his home.

Police say the 45-year-old, whose real name is Oman Rochman, was the main Indonesian translator for IS propaganda and led Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, a network of almost two dozen Indonesian extremist groups that formed in 2015.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, has carried out a sustained crackdown on militants since the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, but a new threat has emerged out of IS sympathisers.

Twin suicide bombings in May killed three police officers in the deadliest militant attack in Jakarta in a year.