Farouk Arnaz – Poor coordination among authorities, weak laws and a prison climate conducive to recruitment are allowing regional terrorist networks to thrive despite a recent crackdown by security forces, the nation's antiterror chief said.

"They're still actively recruiting new members, even from within prisons where they are serving time," Brig. Gen. Tito Karnavian, head of the National Police's Densus 88 counterterrorism squad, said on Thursday.

He said it was ironic that prisons had become thriving centers for recruitment and the dissemination of terrorist ideology, adding that the police and other law-enforcement agencies needed more resources to cope with the threat.

According to Tito, authorities should also be monitoring terrorist networks more intensively with the aim of intercepting information. He called for amendments to the 2003 Law on Terrorism to grant police sweeping powers and to establish a national counterterrorism board.

"The board would be tasked with rehabilitation and preventing future terrorist activities, while the fieldwork would remain under Densus 88," he said.

Tito criticized the antiterror law for not being applicable retroactively to events before 2003, and for the inadmissibility of intelligence reports as grounds for issuing arrest warrants. "There's also weak coordination between law-enforcement agencies, such as the police and the military," he said.

Tito said a soft approach was needed in addition to arrests and raids in order to properly combat terrorism.

He acknowledged that the current strategy was reactionary in nature and did not address the underlying problems driving people toward terrorism. "The terrorist ideology, salafi jihadi, continues to spread," Tito said.

A series of raids in Aceh in February netted 61 suspects from an alleged paramilitary training camp. Tito said information gleaned from the arrests indicated the group planned to establish a base to expand outward from Aceh. "More arrests are expected in the near future," he added.

Tito said information about one of the suspects, Hasan Nur, aka BlackBerry, who was killed in a raid in March, showed that he was originally from Tawi-Tawi in the southern Philippines.

Officers had been sent to the Philippines to confirm the information about Hasan, a known operative for the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and investigate any links he might have had in the region, Tito said.

Another suspect, Suryadi Ahmad, arrested last month in Bekasi, revealed that a plot to attack the State Palace on Independence Day on Aug. 17 had been hatched by Maulana, who was killed in Jakarta last month, and Abdullah Sonata, who remains at large, Tito added.

National Police Chief Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri, meanwhile, said Densus 88 would be restructured this year to make the unit more effective.

"The squad will be led by a two-star general answerable directly to myself," he said. "Though still based at the National Police, it will be renamed Corps 88."

Counterterrorism squads would also be established within each provincial police force to coordinate with Corps 88, he said.