Suspects shot as officers foil Indonesia plot
Print Edition
INDONESIAN police said yesterday that three suspected militants planning a holiday season suicide bombing were killed in a gunbattle on the outskirts of Jakarta in the second imminent attack to be foiled in less than two weeks.
A residential neighborhood was evacuated after bombs were found in a house rented by the men. Police said they had found five low-explosive bombs made from potassium nitrate and defused three so far. Indonesia’s TVOne reported numerous controlled explosions at the location.
The men planned to stage their attack on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve, said Jakarta police chief Mochamad Iriawan. They were to stab police officers in order to attract a crowd and then detonate bombs, he said.
The three men were killed during a violent confrontation with the police’s anti-terror squad in a leafy residential compound in Tangerang, a Jakarta satellite city, after refusing an appeal from authorities to surrender.
National police spokesman Rikwanto said the men threw explosives and fired guns at police. A fourth man, who was arrested in the neighborhood, had led police to the house used by the militants.
“Every year, Christmas and New Year events are the target of terrorists to carry out amaliyah,” Rikwanto told a news conference, using an Arabic term that’s a byword for suicide bombing in militant circles.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, has carried out a sustained crackdown on Islamic militants since the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people. But a new threat has emerged in the past several years from militants who have switched allegiance to the Islamic State group and from new recruits. An attack in the capital Jakarta in January by IS sympathizers killed eight people, including the attackers.
Police said the holiday season plot was uncovered during the interrogation of militants arrested on December 10 who were planning a suicide bomb attack on a guard-changing ceremony at the presidential palace in Jakarta the following day.
Police have said that foiled plot, in which a woman was to be the suicide bomber, was orchestrated by Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian with the Islamic State group in Syria. They also say Naim was behind a bomb lab that was raided last month in West Java and contained enough explosive materials to make bombs three times more powerful than those used in the Bali bombings.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
