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JAKARTA: Indonesian police arrested a man believed to be the military leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah network that has eluded capture since 2003, authorities said on Saturday (December 12).
Aris Sumarsono, also known as Zulkarnaen, was arrested Thursday night by counterterrorism police without resistance in a raid on a house in the East Lampung district on the island of Sumatra, said National Police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan.
Zulkarnaen is suspected of being involved in making bombs used in a series of attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, and a 2003 attack on the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which killed 12 people. Ramadhan said.
The Jemaah Islamiyah network is linked to Al-Qaeda.
Ramadan said that Zulkarnaen, a biologist who was one of the first Indonesian militants to go to Afghanistan for training, is also accused of harboring Upik Lawanga, another bomb maker and a key member of Jemaah Islamiyah.
Lawanga was arrested by the anti-terrorism police in Lampung last week. He had eluded capture since 2005 after being identified as a suspect in an attack that killed more than 20 people at a market in Poso, known as a hotbed of Islamic militancy on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
“He is in custody and investigators are questioning him,” Ramadhan said of Zulkarnaen, adding that police are still conducting an investigation at his home in Lampung.
Police said they were briefed on the location of Zulkarnaen in raids after questioning several suspected militants who were arrested late last month.
Since May 2005, Zulkarnaen has been placed on an Al-Qaeda sanctions list by the UN Security Council for being associated with Osama bin Laden or the Taliban.
The Security Council said that Zulkarnaen was one of Al-Qaeda’s representatives in Southeast Asia and one of the few people in Indonesia who had had direct contact with the Osama bin Laden network.
He said Zulkarnaen led a squad of fighters known as the Laskar Khos, or Special Force, whose members were recruited from some 300 Indonesians who trained in Afghanistan and the Philippines.
He became Jemaah Islamiyah’s chief of operations after the arrest of his predecessor Encep Nurjaman, also known as Hambali, in Thailand in 2003.
In the decade that followed, Indonesian security forces, with the support of the United States and Australia, crushed the Jemaah Islamiyah network, killed leaders and bomb makers, and arrested hundreds of militants.
But a new threat has emerged in recent years from supporters of the Islamic State group, including Indonesians who traveled to the Middle East to fight with the Islamic State.
