Malaysian police have arrested 12 men from a radical Islamic group that they suspect were planning attacks on several neighboring countries, a news report said yesterday.
The Star newspaper said the 12 men -- at least two of them Malaysians -- worked for a group known as Darul Islam, and described the arrests as Malaysian police's biggest success against terrorism since the crackdown five years ago on Kumpulan Militan Malaysia, or KMM, a homegrown Islamic extremist group.
At the time, scores of suspected members of KMM, which is aligned with the regional, al-Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah, were arrested and jailed under a law that allows indefinite detention without trial.
Details about the group's planned targets were not clear, the Star said.
Police officials could not immediately be reached yesterday to confirm the newspaper report.
The Star said Darul Islam is a new Indonesian group, but the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank and other analysts have previously documented the origins of a movement with that name.
The ICG says Darul Islam was the name given to regional rebellions in Indonesia's West Java province in 1948, and in South Sulawesi and Aceh provinces in 1953.
The group says they later united into a movement to set up an Islamic state in Indonesia. Jemaah Islamiyah, a splinter of Darul Islam, emerged in 1993.
The 12 suspected Darul Islam members, mostly Indonesians, were captured recently after about six months of surveillance in Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo Island. Indonesia also has a portion of Borneo.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Hasan Wirayuda, in Malaysia for a nonaligned states' conference, said he had not received official information about the arrests, but called them "an important step to fight terrorism."
"We certainly welcome this and congratulate the Malaysian police, because these arrests will weaken the terrorist groups," Wirayuda told reporters.
He indicated that Indonesian authorities were unaware of the group's existence.
"But as an ideology, a political orientation, it remains [in existence] clandestinely, upholding the aspiration for an Islamic state," Wirayuda said.
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