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(CNN) – Indonesian police said they arrested one of the top members of the militant group Jemaah Islamiah linked to al Qaeda, suspected of being behind the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed more than 200 people.
Jemaah Islamiah’s stated goal is to build an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia.
Zulkarnaen, one of the commanders of the Bali attack, was arrested on Thursday by counter-terrorism police, spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan said in a statement on Saturday.
He said officers encountered no resistance.
Reuters was unable to reach Zulkarnaen or find out if he had legal representation. According to a report from the UN Security Council, he also goes by the name of Aris Sumarsono.
Zulkarnaen is believed to have been involved in making the bombs that were used in the Bali attacks and the 2003 bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 12 people.
The former leader of Jemaah Islamiah, Para Wijayanto, was arrested in 2019.
Stanislaus Riyanta, a security analyst, said Zulkarnaen’s arrest could weaken Jemaah Islamiah’s operations or “incite them to act to prove their existence or seek revenge.”
Reuters has published a correction to this story: it corrects paragraph 6 of the 2003 JW Marriot bombing, which killed 12 people, not the 2009 JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton bombings.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Indonesian Police Arrests Senior Islamist Militant Linked to Bali Bombings”
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