Seven militants were killed during a fierce gunbattle with Indonesian police in East Java Province yesterday and local media said they might include one of Southeast Asia's most wanted Islamic radicals.
Metro TV and other stations said Malaysian Azahari bin Husin had been killed in the shoot-out at a villa in the town of Batu. SCTV station said Azahari might have blown himself up.
Officials said they could not confirm the reports, although the president's spokesman said Azahari was believed to have used the villa as a hideout. National police spokesman Aryanto Budihardjo said the militants shot at anti-terrorism police and hurled 11 explosive devices at them after they surrounded the villa. Other officials said the militants threw grenades.
Budihardjo said police had yet to search the entire villa because it was booby-trapped with bombs.
One policeman had been wounded by gunfire, he said.
Batu police chief Sudijono said from the scene he had seen the bodies of seven militants he described as "terrorists," although they had not been identified.
Dino Patti Djalal, a spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said it was not clear if Azahari had been killed.
Indonesian police say Azahari designed and supervised the making of the car bomb that caused the most damage in the 2002 bomb attacks on Bali island that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
Meanwhile, in Maluku Province, anti-terror police discovered a recently abandoned jungle training camp, where militants taught bomb-making skills to extremists, security officials said yesterday.
Instructors at the camp were graduates of terrorist academies in Afghanistan and the Philippines, police Lieutenant Colonel Leonidas Braksan said.
The isolated camp deep in the jungle had been running for several years and was attended by militants from all over Indonesia, he said, showing how terrorists have been able to maintain training networks despite a nationwide crackdown.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Bolivian government on Friday struck a deal with protesting miners, but was still grappling with blockades and demonstrations by other workers across La Paz. Other groups are still blocking access roads into the city, which is also the seat of the government. Police on Thursday prevented the miners from entering the main square by using tear gas, while the demonstrators hurled stones and explosives with slingshots. Protests against the policies of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz have convulsed the Andean nation since early this month, and roadblocks were choking routes into La Paz throughout Friday, the national road authority said. Miners demanded that Paz
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
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