November 10, 2005

 

A MAN suspected of being Azahari Husin, one of Asia's top terror suspects, blew himself up after being cornered by police overnight but Indonesian authorities will have to wait at least a day to identify the body, a lawmaker and police said.

 

Azahari, a Malaysian from the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaaah Islamiah (JI) militant network and known as the "Demolition Man", was strongly suspected of being one of three men who detonated explosives and killed themselves after a shootout with police in the town of Batu, East Java province.

 

If confirmed, his death would be a major coup for Indonesian security services against JI - which was suspected in another deadly bombing on the resort island of Bali last month.

 

National police chief General Sutanto said he could not immediately say whether one of the three was Azahari, who is suspected of masterminding a string of deadly blasts in Indonesia and supplying bombs used in the 2002 Bali bombings.

 

"Information like that we can only ascertain tomorrow (Thursday)," he said when reporters asked him to comment on reports of the death of Azahari.<>P "We will take every effort to identify the three, including through the use of DNA and showing the bodies to witnesses who know Azahari."

 

 
 
 
However Djoko Susilo, a member of Parliament who spoke with Sutanto at the scene of the shootout, said that based on the information he was given: "I am 95 per cent convinced that Azahari is already dead there. "But scientifically we still need to ascertain the death with a post-mortem, or more precisely through DNA testing because the bodies inside were in bits and pieces."

 

When police chief Sutanto was asked how he knew Azahari might be among the three, he said: "From information obtained from one of the perpetrators whom we have arrested in Semarang earlier today."

 

He identified that suspect by the initials CH.

 

A police source in Semarang, the capital of neighbouring Central Java province, said that three people were arrested about half an hour before the 7.30pm (AEDT) raid in Batu.

 

Mr Sutanto said the shootout erupted when the men refused to surrender to police after they encircled their modest house.

 

"They shot first and it hit a police officer who was wounded," he said, adding that after the shootout there were 11 blasts, "the last one being quite strong".

 

"The last one appears to have been a suicide. They (the three) all died."

 

He said the bodies remained in the house and police would not enter until any explosives remaining there were detonated by a bomb squad.

 

Karni Ilyas, an Indonesian journalist who said he accompanied a police anti-terror unit as it raided Azahari's house, said Azahari was dead.

 

"The body was in pieces but his face could still be recognised by two members of the anti-terrorist unit from Jakarta," Mr Ilyas said.

 

Azahari and his Malaysian compatriot Noordin Mohammad Top are wanted for key roles in the October 2002 attacks on Bali nightclubs that left 202 people dead, 88 of them Australians, as well as last month's triple suicide attack and several other deadly blasts.

 

Azahari, in his late forties, studied in Australia for four years in the late 1970s and became a lecturer at Malaysia's University of Technology before dropping out of sight during a crackdown on Islamic militants in 2001.

 

Azahari left his wife with the words that he had the greater cause of God to serve, security sources say, speculating that his move to radical Islam could have been prompted by his wife developing throat cancer in the early 1990s.

 

While some reports of the previously shadowy Azahari say he trained in bomb-making in Afghanistan, he is believed to have honed his skills with Muslim separatists in Mindanao in the southern Philippines in 1999.

 

Security officials say he is the author of the JI bomb manual, and that he was widely named as a possible successor to JI operations chief Hambali, an Indonesian arrested in Thailand in 2003 and now in US custody.

 

Azahari and Noordin narrowly escaped a police dragnet in 2003 in the Indonesian city of Bandung on Java island, and Indonesian newspapers at the time criticised the police for their failure to capture them.