Jakarta – Indonesia is increasingly serious about confronting apparent efforts by Al-Qaeda to establish a terrorist beachhead in the world's most populous Muslim nation, the US ambassador to Jakarta said on Tuesday.

"My impression is they are increasingly engaged, increasingly serious and certainly stepping up to the possibility," Mr Ralph Boyce told Reuters news agency. He had been asked about Indonesian efforts to go after operatives of Al-Qaeda network.

Mr Boyce said that "a tiny fraction" of Indonesians professing radical Islamic beliefs might conceivably be linked to Al-Qaeda. But he stressed that despite recent revelations about such activity attributed to Omar al-Faruq, an Arab arrested in Indonesia in June and turned over to the US authorities, Washington did not view Indonesia as a hotbed of terrorist activity.

"Quite the contrary, Indonesian Islam is probably among ... the most moderate, open, tolerant anywhere in the world," said Mr Boyce, who in his year in the post has met Muslim leaders including militant ones frequently.

Officials in some neighbouring countries have said Indonesia has played down the regional terrorist threat and been reluctant to go after individuals, especially Indonesian nationals, linked by their intelligence agencies to terrorism.

While Mr Boyce has not made that criticism, he did say that when al-Faruq's charges – which described efforts in Indonesia over several years to carry out terrorist activity – first surfaced, there was an initial tendency "in the press, in the public and even some elements in the government ... that sort of said 'How dare these charges be levied against Indonesia?'. My sense is that there is a very healthy shift to addressing the report and the charges themselves," he said.