Southeast Asia update
By Kenneth Conboy
On 1 July, the Singaporean government announced that it had detained five members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) between February and May of this year. The only prominent name among the five was Mas Selamat bin Kasteri, a former JI leader in Singapore who had fled to Indonesia soon after 11 September 2001 and was captured by the Indonesian authorities in December 2001. The Indonesians could only jail him on an immigration violation; he was released in February 2006, deported to his home country, and immediately re-arrested. Kasteri reportedly intended numerous terrorist strikes in Singapore (including an attack on an international school), though none of the schemes were ever realized.
At the same time, the Singaporean government released five other JI suspects who had reportedly cooperated with the authorities during their detention.
In other news, the mystery over the Indonesian national detained in southern Thailand last month deepens. That Indonesian, Sabri Amiruddin, was reportedly captured with up to three kilos of nails and eighty (not one, as initially reported in the press) kilos of fertilizer. A native of West Sumatra, Sabri had lived in southern Thailand for the past several years and had a Thai wife. Despite the fact that he was caught with components often used in JI bombs, the Thai authorities have reportedly insisted he was linked to drug trafficking, not terrorism. Indonesian officials are still looking into the terrorist angle, however, noting that the JI network in Sabri's native West Sumatra is still relatively intact.
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