Any plans to revise the 2003 Counterterrorism Law should be preceded by comprehensive research on how to effectively tackle terrorism, a legal expert said on Sunday.

Speaking just days after Djoko Suyanto, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, said that Indonesia would not emulate Singapore and Malaysia with an Internal Security Act, Adrianus Meliala, a criminologist at the University of Indonesia, said lack of follow-through was the primary reason why Indonesia continued to face difficulties combating terrorism.

"It seems that efforts to tackle terrorism, including plans to revise the law, are half-hearted," Adrianus said. "Terrorism is no ordinary crime. It is time for the government to see terrorism as the sequence of actions that leads to the terrorist act itself."

Djoko said on Friday that the government had plans to change the Counterterrorism Law, with revisions to be submitted by early next year, but had no plan to implement "anything like the ISA." Malaysia's ISA allows for indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without trial.

National Police Chief Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri said plans to rewrite the law would be welcomed by law enforcers. "The time we have to detain suspects is just four months, which is very short," he said. "Not to mention the time we're given to gather evidence – just seven days."

Adrianus on Sunday agreed that the time police had to investigate terrorism-related cases was far too short. "The government should change the way it views terrorism," he said. "The law only sees the terrorist act itself, but not what precedes it, such as the widespread dissemination of messages of hate."

According to Adrianus, the law also assumed that terrorism was planned or initiated by just a single person or a small group.

"In cases of terrorism in Indonesia, individuals play just a small part in the scores of roles needed for a single terrorist act, which includes the mastermind himself, the intelligence gatherers and the financiers. They all play roles," he said. "The law should define in detail the differing methods needed to tackle each role."

Adrianus said he suspected the reluctance to take a strong hand against terrorism was a perception that an attack on terrorists, would be equated with an attack on Islam.

The National Police on Friday said three terrorist suspects arrested last week would face charges of helping to fund an armed militant group in Aceh that was believed to have been planning an attack on the State Palace on Aug. 17, during Independence Day celebrations.

The suspects were members of an Islamist group, Jemaah Anshoru Tauhid, which is led by hard-line cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

At least 14 terrorist suspects linked to JAT have been arrested in police raids across Java, including at the group's Jakarta office on May 6. However, Bashir on Sunday insisted that JAT was not a terrorist group.

"We're just a small group of Muslims in Indonesia. Outside Java, there is only a branch in Bima, West Nusa Tenggara. In Sumatra, Kalimantan and other islands, we have not established a branch office," he said.

"I wonder from where police received information that Abdul Haris [one of the arrested JAT members] supplied Rp 400 million [$44,000] to the jihad movement in Aceh? Even to pay the Rp 40 million rent on our office in Jakarta, we don't have money."