Indonesian anti-terror police detained radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir yesterday and several other militants in a crackdown on a network found making bombs and planning to attack Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The detention of Bashir, considered by many foreign governments as a driving force for radical Islamic movements in Indonesia, shows Jakarta is stepping up a fight against a relatively new network plotting a coup to form a Shariah state.
Indonesia's efforts to combat religious extremism and its increased political stability have been welcomed by investors, who have poured into longer-dated bonds and stocks despite deadly attacks on hotels in Jakarta last year.
It underlines the change in tactics by militants away from Western targets — such as hotels in Jakarta or tourists in Bali — to state institutions to try to destabilize the government.
“From documents, we knew this group had for some time made the president the target of their attack,” police spokesman Edward Aritonang said after Bashir's detention.
Bashir, who told reporters his detention was a plot by the US, was linked by the police’s anti-terror unit Detachment 88 to a militant training camp in the western region of Aceh.
Aceh is the only province that has Islamic Shariah law in a country which is home to the world's largest Muslim population.
“Investigators from Detachment 88 found a clear link from the militant training in Aceh, plans of bomb attacks in several places to the discovery of a laboratory in Cibiru ... we reached a conclusion that one of the persons involved in these well-planned events was Abu Bakar Bashir,” Aritonang said.
Bashir is the leader of Islamist group Jema’ah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT) and a founder of the al-Mukmin boarding school at Ngruki in Solo, one of whose graduates was executed for planning the Bali bomb attacks in 2002 that killed more than 200 people.
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a report last month that JAT believes jihad against local officials who reject Islamic law is as important as the one against the US and its allies.
The group had been planning a car bomb attack on the police national headquarters, and targeted several embassies, Aritonang told a news conference.
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