Hambali 'asked by al-Qaeda to recruit pilots for hijacks'
The real war against terror continues with successes that makes world at large safe from callous criminals. Only and only relentless follow up of these hard core criminals can ensure some safety, Bush policy of unremitting follow-up is paying rich dividends, any other policy would have not worked. "He's a known killer, who was a close associate of Sept 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Mr Bush said of Hambali. "He is no longer a problem to those of us who love freedom," the US president told an audience of military personnel and their families at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in California.
"It was an undercover operation ... (involving) significant manpower," and more than one US agency, one official said. "It's a huge catch, he was the third-most-wanted terrorist in the world," behind Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, added the official.
Published: August 16 2003 5:00 |
The suspected leader of south-east Asia's Islamic terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah had been asked by al-Qaeda to recruit pilots for another wave of aircraft hijackings, according to US officials.
A senior US official said Hambali - arrested in Thailand earlier this week - might have been planning a new September 11-style attack and had received funding from an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan.
The capture of Hambali had dealt a severe, but not crippling, blow to JI, regional terrorism experts said yesterday. But they warned that his arrest could trigger new terrorist attacks within days or weeks.
"In the short-term, terrorist plans might be accelerated to offset the psychological damage of Hambali's capture and prevent the exposure of new operations that he might reveal under interrogation," said Kumar Ramakrishna of Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
Nonetheless, the arrest of Hambali is considered a significant breakthrough in the fight against militant Islamic terrorism in the region.
Hambali was seen as responsible for setting JI's general strategy, such as deciding last year to shift from "hard" targets, such as western embassies, to "soft" ones, including nightclubs in Bali and the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. He was also the main link to al-Qaeda, which provided financial support and training to JI.
David Wright-Neville, of Monash University's global terrorism research project in Melbourne, said Hambali's arrest left JI without a clear leader and had the potential to throw the network into organisational chaos.
With Hambali's capture, all of JI's founders have been removed. "I'm not sure whether there are any other people with this sort of history and authority who can take over," he said.
"It remains to be seen whether the organisation will degenerate or whether it will become more unpredictable and violent."
But Mr Ramakrishna warned that there was a high level of autonomy among JI cells. "They have become responsible for day-to-day operations after Hambali was forced to go into hiding," he said, following the round-up of the JI network in Malaysia and Singapore in 2001.
Remaining at large are the group's three alleged main bombmakers. They include Azahari Husin, a former Malaysian professor of statistics, and Dulmatin, an Indonesian allegedly involved in the Bali blast. Another explosives expert, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, escaped from a Manila jail last month.
Officials in the Philippines also believe that JI has received help from separatist Muslim rebels fighting on the southern island of Mindanao, including providing base and training camps for JI operatives.
JI has also succeeded in attracting new recruits to replace 200 JI suspects who have been detained since 2001.
If Hambali talks under interrogation, he would provide an overall picture of JI's activities in the region and the group's top echelon, although he might be unable to supply details about planned actions due to the group's compartmentalised structure.
"[Hambali has] been involved in getting money, organising operations, getting the explosives, doing the design work - all of that kind of thing in relation to terrorist attacks in south-east Asia," said Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister.
The authorities might have wanted to keep Hambali's arrest on Tuesday secret for at least three days both to minimise the risk of immediate retaliatory strikes and to enable them to move him to a place where they could interrogate him, said Mr Wright-Neville.
"These terrorist organisations have counter-intelligence firewalls and people go into hiding to minimise the knock-on effects," he said. "On arrest they would have interrogated him fairly intensively with a view to trying to get as much information out of him as they could before there was a sense within the network that he had disappeared."
Thai officials say Hambali was taken into custody early this week in the sleepy Buddhist temple town of Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok. Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister, said police had acted on a tip-off from local people, who had become suspicious of the stranger in their midst. He is now believed to be under interrogation outside of Thailand.
Hambali, a 39-year-old Indonesian cleric whose real name is Riduan Isamuddin, is believed to have been the mastermind of the bombing last October of a Bali nightclub, which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
Reports by John Burton, South-East Asia Correspondent, Amy Kazmin in Bangkok and Anna Fifield in Sydney |
