A NEATLY groomed business type in collared shirt and jacket, crew-cut and trimmed beard. A bespectacled nerd in metal-rimmed glasses with long sideburns and oiled hair. An anonymous jihadist in full-face balaclava spewing vitriol against the "enemies of Islam".
These are among the many guises of Noordin Mohammed Top, the elusive serial bomber, most wanted man in Asia and key suspect in last week's hotel bombings in Jakarta. The one-time accountant from Johor in southern Malaysia has emerged in recent years as the operational leader behind a series of bombings, culminating in last Friday's suicide attacks on the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels.
Top is known not only as a master of disguise and skilled escape artist who has eluded an Indonesian police dragnet for seven years. He is also a logistical and technical mastermind and, even more troubling, a charismatic recruiter of young would-be martyrs who is known to have volunteers in the wings waiting to set off more bombs.
He also harbours a visceral hatred of Australia, which he has pinpointed repeatedly in his diatribes and is bound to target again in future attacks unless he is captured or killed.
So who is the ruthless technocrat who has defied the leadership of his organisation, Jemaah Islamiah, to carry on the murderous campaign for an Indonesian Islamic state?
In the 1990s Top was a science graduate studying for his masters at the University of Technology Malaysia in Johore, southern Malaysia, a hotbed of Muslim student radicalism and hub of the Islamist movement.
He joined a religious study group that met at the home of a UTM academic and fellow Malaysian, Wan Min bin Wan Mat, who was a lecturer in project management in the faculty of science and engineering.
A regular speaker at these sessions was a fiery young Islamic teacher and veteran of the Afghan jihad named Ali Ghufron, later known by his nom de guerre Mukhlas as the controller of the 2002 Bali bombings.
At the time, Mukhlas was head of a new school set up by JI's exiled leaders in a jungle clearing in Johore, Luqmanul Hakim, to groom a new generation of jihadists to fight for a pan-Asian Islamic state.
The bookish science student Top was enthralled by the tales of holy war. "We were mesmerised by the JI leadership and its struggle," Wan Min said years later after renouncing JI. "When you come into such a group, you cannot think rationally. We were convinced our struggle was correct."
After completing his studies Top was employed to teach maths and geology at the JI school, and was later promoted to the role of director. He and his UTM colleagues, who also included mathematics professor Azahari Husin, became the intellectual and administrative brains trust of JI, which was controlled at the time from Malaysia.
After swearing allegiance to JI's leader in 1998, Top was promoted to lead its Malaysian branch and administrative headquarters, known as Mantiqi 1. He is not known to have trained or fought in Afghanistan but underwent military training at JI's Camp Hudaibiyah in Mindinao in the southern Philippines.
In late 2001, after Singaporean police discovered a JI plot to bomb Western embassies in Singapore, Top and his colleagues fled to Bangkok, where they set up a new command centre under the leadership of the group's operations chief, Hambali.
Top and his fellow fugitives referred to themselves as the muhajarin (migrants), a term used by the original followers of the prophet Mohammed who fled with him from Mecca into exile in Medina to evade their enemies and build their Islamic state.
It was during their Bangkok exile that JI's first al-Qa'ida-backed attack on Western targets -- the 2002 Bali bombings -- was conceived. It was entrusted to the men from UTM, Top and Azahari, who "received orders from Hambali to prepare a proposal for an operation", according to Wan Min. Read more here,,,
Source: The Australian
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