Terrorist Noordin Death Debunked by Analysis

Reports of Jemaah Islamiah leader Noordin Muhammed Top
have been in error as fingerprint and facial
reconstruction efforts fail to verify his death.

Fingerprint analysis has confirmed that a man killed by Indonesian police at the weekend was not fugitive terror suspect Noordin Mohammed Top, a counter-terror police officer said.

Officials were publicly sticking to their line that only DNA tests would confirm the identity of the body but a source involved in the investigation said Noordin remained at large.

"It's not him. We know from his facial structure as well as his fingerprints," the police source said, requesting anonymity.

Noordin was reported by the local media to have been shot dead by police at the end of a 17-hour siege of a remote farmhouse in Central Java on Saturday.

Senior counter-terrorism official Ansyad Mbai refused to comment on the identity of the body retrieved from the farmhouse, saying DNA tests would confirm whether it was Noordin or not.

"It's better that we wait for the forensic identification," he said.

Noordin, 40, is a Malaysian Islamist who is wanted for multiple suicide bombings against Western targets in Indonesia since 2003 which have killed around 50 people and injured hundreds.

He is one of the most wanted alleged terror masterminds in Asia, and has a $119,960 bounty on his head from the Indonesian government.

The police source indicated that Noordin may have escaped from the farmhouse before police laid siege to it around 4pm on Friday.

"We were not as quick as him," he said.

Police have come close to arresting the Malaysian, who leads a breakaway faction of the Jemaah Islamiah regional terror network, several times and have captured or killed some of his closest associates.

They have intensified the hunt since the July 17 twin suicide bombings on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in the capital, which killed seven people including six foreigners plus the two bombers. Read more here...

Source: New Media Journal

Abu Bakar Bashir's warning: the terror will not end

Paul Toohey, Solo | July 23

ABU Bakar Bashir has endorsed the deadly work of Southeast Asia's most wanted terrorist, Noordin Top, saying Allah would protect him in his fight for Islam.

The fanatical Muslim cleric, who is the spiritual adviser to the al-Mukmin Islamic school for children on the outskirts of Solo, in central Java, said if the victims of the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton suicide bombings had ever held any thoughts against Islam, they deserved to die.

Bashir refused to condemn the suicide bombings, saying the use of terror was justified in the war against infidels, or non-Muslims.

Bashir was convicted and jailed for inciting terrorism in relation to the 2002 Bali bombings and has not since moderated his views.

He is seen as the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah, and while he is deeply unpopular in Indonesia, he carries dangerous influence that marks him as more than a mere ranting eccentric. The 1000 boys and 1000 girls who board at the al-Mukmin school he co-founded are taught predominantly in Arabic, and are indoctrinated to his views from kindergarten through to their leaving certificate.

Bashir regularly travels across Java to other pesantrens, or Islamic schools, to speak, although on Tuesday, in the east Java town of Malang, Indonesian police reportedly banned him from giving a public lecture.

Yesterday, Bashir attacked the Australian, US and Indonesian governments. "The main cause of this disaster (the bombings) is the Indonesian government, which undermines the supremacy of Islamic law.

"This (terror) will not end until the government follows the right path."

Asked by The Australian whether he felt any sadness for the seven victims of the suicide bombings, Bashir said: "What makes me sad about the bombings was that it involved innocent people being killed.

"People such as women and children who are not involved in the fight against Muslims should not be killed.

"But the problem is we don't know for sure that the victims weren't involved in the fight against Islam.

Even the thought of fighting against Islam is involvement. Everyone that thinks like that is allowed to be killed."

Read more here,,,

Source: The Australian

The War on Australia

Sally Neighbour | July 22

Soldiers threw a cordon around Jakarta's Ritz-Carlton hotel,
one of two hotels struck by suicide bombers.

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

Jihad in the classroom

Sally Neighbour | July 21

INDONESIA will continue to live with the threat of terror attacks unless its government cracks down on the militant Islamic schools and religious zealots who espouse worldwide jihad.

Last Friday's hotel bombings in Jakarta have focused attention yet again on a network of radical Islamic boarding schools across Indonesia that continues to espouse the cause of violent jihad and churn out eager young zealots willing to die in its name.

Four days after the bombings, investigators have linked them to two Islamic schools that are well known to the Indonesian authorities but have neither been shut down nor had their activities or teachings curtailed.

The first of these is the now notorious Al Mukmin pesantren (boarding house) at Ngruki in Solo, Central Java, where the Marriott suicide bomber is reported to have been schooled.

The second is a smaller school at Cilacap in Central Java, where a bomb identical to the hotel bombs used in Jakarta was found in July, and which is believed to have provided shelter to suspected mastermind Noordin Top.

A Muslim leader in Jakarta yesterday identified the man who detonated a backpack and case full of explosives inside the Marriott restaurant as Nur Hasbi, who is believed to have graduated from the Ngruki school in 1995. Thus the school continues to live up to its reputation as "a crucible for the formation of cadres of mujahidin", and its mission, "to nurture zeal for jihad so that love for jihad and martyrdom grow in the soul of the mujahidin", in the words of its co-founder, Jemaah Islamiah leader, Abu Bakar Bashir.

Nur Hasbi was no doubt inspired by his reported classmate, Asmar Latin Sani, who carried out the previous attack on the Marriott in 2003, after which his severed head was found on the fifth floor of the smashed hotel.

The connection is no coincidence.

The Ngruki school and others linked to JI -- chiefly the Darul Syahadah ("house of martyrs") and Al Muttaqin schools, both in Central Java -- have produced no less than dozens of young recruits linked to a string of terrorist attacks, starting with the first Bali bombings in 2002.

"The most common link between participants in the terrorist movement in Indonesia in the past 10 years has been attendance at those schools," says Ken Ward, a former senior analyst with the Office of National Assessments, who has worked on in a project tracing terrorist networks in Southeast Asia, in conjunction with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Ward says the Indonesian government has been slow to take on the militant schools because it doesn't actually know what they teach, fears a political backlash, and seems unable to decide what constitutes radical Islam.

"I think it's a big problem with confronting the JI ideology. A lot of Indonesians can't agree on what's undesirable about it, except that they reject bombing."

As a result, despite a vigorous program to "de-radicalise" JI detainees, the origins of radicalisation -- within the school system -- are seemingly ignored.

"It's almost as though the Indonesians are willing to allow people to acquire radical Islamic beliefs and then later try to de-radicalise them, rather than try to de-radicalise the education system."

I visited the Ngruki school in 2002 after the Bali bombings and again last year. In 2002 the principal had a portrait of Osama bin Laden on his door, and an ABC TV crew filmed a classroom in which childish drawings of bombs and sticks of dynamite were scrawled on a blackboard. At a mosque nearby we witnessed the now famous sermon by Abu Bakar Bashir: "Between you and us there will forever be a ravine of hate and we will be enemies until you follow Allah's law."

By 2008 little had changed, except that the school has expanded over the years.

Read more here:

Source: The Australian