Islamic militant alleged to have links to wanted Noordin Mohammad Top blamed for organizing the Bali bombing.
Jakarta (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Indonesian police have arrested a suspected Islamic militant alleged to have links to wanted Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad Top, press reports said on Thursday. Members of the elite anti-terror unit Detachment 88, aided by local police, nabbed Subur Sugiarto on board an intercity bus in Boyolali, Central Java, late on Wednesday, the Kompas daily said, quoting local police chief Handono Warih.
Neither he nor national police were immediately available for comment.
The state Antara news agency said Subur Sugiarto, who also went by the aliases of Abu Mujahid and Marwan Hidayat, was believed to be a martial arts expert and had undergone military training.
Neither report said where he was being questioned.
Police raided Subur Sugiarto's rented house in Central Java's Semarang in November, uncovering bomb-making manuals as well as documents that led to his name being added to a list of terrorist suspects, reports said at the time.
The Semarang-based Suara Merdeka newspaper said without quoting sources that Sugiarto was thought to have received training in bomb-making from Azahari bin Husin, who was killed in a police raid on his hideout in East Java in November.
Both Noordin and Azahari, also a Malaysian, were key members of extremist network Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed for a slew of deadly attacks in Southeast Asia, but experts say the pair may have split off to form an even more hardline group.
Sugiarto's reported arrest comes a few days after police nabbed four other people suspected of helping Noordin evade capture. The four were caught in separate raids in the Central Javan towns of Semarang and Klaten on January 13.
Azahari was tracked down weeks after a triple suicide bombing on the resort island of Bali, which killed 20 bystanders. Both he and Noordin were blamed for orchestrating the attacks as well as the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people, mostly holidaymakers.