Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – The 15 people arrested in the past month for allegedly plotting fresh terror attacks in Indonesia attended meetings led by the supposed heir of Abu Bakar Bashir.
Sources in the police told The Straits Times that the arrests of the 15 since last month for allegedly plotting more attacks in the capital would not have been possible if they had not been pursuing a group of people linked to Abu Rusdan.
Rusdan, arrested in April for links to last October's Bali bombings, has confessed to police that he had replaced the militant Islamic cleric as leader of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terror group.
Between April and the attack on Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel on August 5, several more people were caught with explosives, arms and documents detailing their involvement in JI.
A high-ranking officer said of the arrests in the past month: "We failed to prevent that attack, that is why we moved fast this time before another strike." Police said the detained suspects had considered targeting several places, including the National Police headquarters and the Jakarta police's office.
None of them has been linked directly to the Marriott or Bali blasts, but some are believed to have harboured suspects involved in those attacks. Some in the group of 15 had held seven meetings since last year, the first of which was just five days after last year's Bali bombing attacks.
The October 17 meeting at the home of one of the 15 plotters in Tawangmangu, Central Java, was attended by Mukhlas, one of the chief suspects in the Bali bombings who is currently on trial.
At this meeting, they talked about the "success" of the attack and the plight of the families of the bombing masterminds. Rusdan led this meeting and other gatherings in the next few months, including one at the popular resort area of Puncak, west Java, about 150km from Jakarta.
Testimonies and confessions from him and other detained militants involved in other bombings helped police focus their investigations.
They began "picking up" the suspects on August 14 in hush-hush operations so as not to alert the other suspects they were after. The arrests were made separately in Lampung, Jakarta, and Semarang and Solo in Central Java. Police said they are still pursuing other suspects but the current media reports on the arrests might hamper their operation.
The arrests have been criticised because investigators only produced arrest warrants after picking up the suspects – in some cases days later. Several of the suspects' wives said their husbands had been singled out because they had gone to Afghanistan to train for jihad.
One of those arrested, Bambang Tutuko, is a professor of engineering at the Universitas Semarang. Colleagues said he became a changed man after a four-month trip in late 1998 to Johor, Malaysia, where he said he was taking computer courses.
"He started growing a beard, refused to shake hands with women, and wore baggy pants that came above his ankle the way some of the hardline groups do," said one professor. "He also stopped participating in campus activities, but we never would have thought he was a terrorist." Bambang allegedly let his house in Tawangmangu be used by the suspects for meetings to plan the attacks.