Indonesian Police Raids in Sumatra Yield Suspects, Bombs
By Kenneth Conboy
Over the past three days, the Indonesian police counter-terrorist formation, Detachment 88, has conducted a series of raids in and around the city of Palembang in South Sumatra province. On 28 June, a Singaporean national named Alim (alias Omar, alias Taslim, alias Abu Hazam) was the first to be detained. According to the Indonesian media, Alim is a bomb-making expert who was trained in Afghanistan prior to 2001 and met Osama bin Laden on several occasions. Alim is said to have received further bomb-making instructions from Dr. Azhari Husein, the Jemaah Islamiyah bomber who was killed in a police shoot-out in East Java in October 2005.
On 1 July, eight (possibly nine) Indonesian nationals at three locations--all said to be members of Jemaah Islamiyah--were arrested. At one of these three locations, twenty assembled bombs and several kilos of explosives were found. The police are still not sure what target(s) were being contemplated by this cell.