Four foreign men detained in Indonesia for allegedly planning to take part in militant training were officially named suspects for breaking counter-terrorism and immigration laws, police said on Saturday.
The men, who police believe to be ethnic Uighurs from China, are suspected of arranging to meet the country’s most wanted militant, Santoso, for training.
They were formally arrested on Friday night after a week in custody.
Police are also investigating whether the men have links to the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, that has seized control over parts of Syria and Iraq, but say their motives for seeking training are so far unknown.
Santoso’s Eastern Indonesia Mujahidin network hides out in the central mountains of Sulawesi, a known hotbed for militancy, and is blamed for a spate of police killings in the area.
This is the first known case in recent years of foreigners coming to Indonesia for training.
Authorities have been more concerned with the dozens of Indonesians joining extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, fearing they may return with networks and skills to carry out deadly attacks in the country.
Police initially thought the men were Turkish, but later said their Turkish passports were discovered to be fakes and had been obtained for about US$1,000 from a broker in Bangkok.
They now believe the men are from China’s Xinjiang Province and are Uighur, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, but have not officially confirmed their identities.
Three Indonesians were also formally arrested and named suspects for aiding the men. Under Indonesia’s legal system, suspects are only formally charged once they face court.
Indonesia has in the past struggled to quell Muslim militant groups, which carried out a string of deadly attacks last decade, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners.
A successful clampdown in recent years has seen the end of major lethal attacks, but has given rise to smaller splinter groups.
Indonesia is home to the world’s biggest Muslim population. It is also the world’s third-biggest democracy, where the vast majority practice a moderate form of Islam.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema