Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – Indonesian police will today intensify their attempts to determine whether a man who identified himself as the terrorist Noordin Top, and who was killed in a raid in Central Java yesterday, is in fact the fugitive they believe to be responsible for the July 17 Jakarta bombings.
The Malaysian-born al-Qa'ida and Jemaah Islamiah-linked attacker has been named as the mastermind behind the attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels, in which nine people including two suicide bombers died, and dozens were seriously injured.
In a more than 17-hour raid on a remote rural house near the town of Temanggung in Central Java starting on Friday afternoon, elite Detachment 88 anti-terror police killed a lone man who is reported to have yelled at them that he was Top.
The siege followed the arrests of two men at a marketplace in Temanggung, who are believed to have told police Top was at their uncle's house.
However national police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri admitted late yesterday he was "not yet prepared" to say whether the man killed was indeed the radical, who has been blamed for previous bombings at the Jakarta Marriott hotel in 2003, the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004 and in Bali in 2005.
Pictures that began circulating several hours after the raids suggested the corpse flown to the national police hospital in Jakarta yesterday afternoon did not resemble police photographs previously published of Top.
The crime scene photographs showed a man whose upper head had been blown away but with a jawline and lower face strikingly different to that of the official Top images, which depict a very moonfaced character.
The dead man's skin also appeared to be of a much darker hue than Top's in his wanted pictures.
DNA samples taken from the children of a woman Top is believed to have married under an assumed name in Cilacap, Central Java, will be used in an attempt to verify the corpse's identify.
Terrorism experts believe one of Top's strategies has involved marrying several women in Malaysia and Indonesia to guarantee his protection by a small group of hardliners who are fighting to bring down the Jakarta government and replace it with an Islamic caliphate.
Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group and amongst the most respected commentators on the Islamist terrorism issue in Indonesia, said last week she believed Noordin's group of terrorist fugitives and plotters probably numbered no more than 30 people.
Malaysian police were also last night offering assistance in the forensic quest to identify the body retrieved from the farmhouse.
Live television footage of the raid throughout Friday night and into Saturday included images of its dramatic climax, where Detachment 88 officers planted a bomb through a window of the structure and then ran for their lives while colleagues detonated the device.
Police were then reported to be high-fiving and handshaking in jubilation at their success, after a seven-man sniper squad aimed a prolonged volley of bullets at the building and a secondary unit followed up with a direct attack on the structure, including pouring gunfire through the windows.
The lone man inside the small house was found dead in its bathroom, news reports said. Earlier reports suggesting up to three more people were also inside appear to have been wrong. The building was late yesterday sealed with zinc sheeting in order to preserve it as a crime scene.
The terrorist Top is a former associate of the master bomber Azhari Husin, another Malaysian killed in a police shootout in East Java in 2005 from which Top escaped at the last minute.
Police chief General Danuri also claimed yesterday that two men shot dead on Friday night in Bekasi, on the southeastern outskirts of Jakarta, were involved in a plot to bomb the nearby home of President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono.
The pair were killed in an attack on a building alleged by police to be a "safe house" where the bombs used in the Jakarta attacks three weeks ago might have been stored and which police had apparently been monitoring for several days.
However General Danuri offered no direct evidence for his claim of the conspiracy other than that the "safe house" in Bekasi was a few minutes away from Dr Yudhoyono's rural home in Cikeas, also to Jakarta's southeast.
Police have come under increasing pressure since the attacks to make a breakthrough, with General Danuri unexpectedly offering the surprise detail yesterday of the two July 17 bombers' identities.
He said they were 18-year-old Dani Dwi Permana, from the city of Bogor south of Jakarta, and a man named Nana Ikhwan Maulana. He did not specify Maulana's age or origin, and refused to answer further questions.
Dr Yudhoyono claimed several hours after the Jakarta bombing that he had evidence he was also a terrorist target, although there is no reason to believe Noordin or others are interested in political assassinations and there has been criticism that the President, who was reelected in a landslide several weeks ago, was manipulating information on the tragedy for his own ends.