Jakarta (AsiaNews) Anti-terrorist searches by police forces are conducted ever more in schools and universities, as they are considered breeding grounds for radical Islam.
East Java police have arrested Adi Sunarya, age 40, a Muslim teacher from Surabaya. He is suspected of having ties with Malaysian terrorists. Yesterday in Surabaya, the capital of East Java, serg. Harunantyo told journalists that police suspect the Islamic teacher might have links to Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammad Top, who fled from a police raid last year in Bandung.
Both are being hunted for their roles in the Bali attack (Oct. 2002) and that of the Marriot Hotel in Jakarta last August. Both attacks which caused hundreds of deaths are attributed to the extremist group, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), of which Azahari and Noordin are members. Both escaped being captured last September. Police officials stated that the two are armed, even with explosives, and are believed to be still in Indonesia. Azahari was a statistics professor at the Malaysian Institute of Technoly and is an explosives expert. He is believed to be the head of JI in all of southeast Asia.
Meanwhile in Denpasar (Bali), 32 year-old Sarjio (alias: Sawad and Zaenal Abidin) is one suspect in the attack. He admitted that it was he, a chemical technician, who mixed a batch of explosives for the bombs which exploded on Oct. 12 2002, leaving 202 persons dead most of which were foreign tourists.
The Thai government, subjected to a wave of violence concentrated in the southern part of the country, asked Indonesia to check up on the behavior of Thai Muslim students living in Indonesia. Their suspicion is that many students learn about violent tactics at universities. "Some of them might be involved even in violent activities within their host country." (MH)