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Hambali kept low profile in quiet Thai tourist town
More details coming out on the arrest.Hambali, Southeast Asiaâs most wanted man, kept a low profile in the quiet Thai tourist town where he was captured, neighbours said on Friday. "I think I saw him twice. He acted like an ordinary person," one neighbour said of the mystery man who lived in flat 601. She did not describe the circumstances under which she saw Hambali. The bespectacled Muslim cleric, blamed for last Octoberâs Bali nightclub bombings and on the run since 2000, was captured on Tuesday in the modest flat in Thailandâs ancient capital Ayutthaya, handed over to the Americans and flown out of the country to a secret location. The famous undisclosed secret location. The Bunyarak apartments lie on a quiet street at the centre of the town. A food shop and a laundromat occupy the ground floor. The nearest police station is just two km (one mile) away. The shattered apartment front door of 601 was marked by the bootmarks of security agents who carried out the raid. Security Agent Jackboots, available at fine stores everywhere. One woman, who was afraid to give her name, said the building had been mostly empty on Tuesday due to a national holiday. "I never saw him, but when I came back I heard the police had come to arrest foreigners here," she told Reuters Television. Hambali, now clean-shaven and his face altered by plastic surgery, was arrested with a woman on Tuesday in a joint operation with the CIA. U.S. officials say he is being questioned at an undisclosed location outside Thailand. "Where, we just canât say." Ayutthaya, 80 km (50 miles) north of Bangkok and with a population of about 80,000, is a popular daytrip for tourists seeking out temple ruins dating back hundreds of years. It is also home to a small Muslim community, among whom Hambali was apparently seeking to hide. He had crossed into Thailand last Monday from Laos, using a fake Spanish passport, officials said. Been to Passportâs RâUs, I see. As the suspected operational brains of the shadowy militant Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiah network, Hambali was the regionâs most wanted man, accused of masterminding last yearâs bloody Bali bombings among many other deadly attacks. Aged about 40, he was the main link between Jemaah Islamiah and Osama bin Ladenâs al Qaeda network, intelligence sources say. He might know where Binnyâs Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra credited the arrest to leads from locals and intelligence agency cooperation. "We received tipoffs from local people that there were strange-looking people staying around there so we checked their background and passports and realised that they were the people were looking for," Thaksin said during a visit to Sri Lanka. After going underground three years ago, rumours of his suspected whereabouts had ballooned into scores of possible sightings, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Thailand to Cambodia. A Cambodian intelligence source told Reuters that Hambali had been sitting under their noses from September 2002 to March 2003, often in a tourist hotel popular with pot-smoking hippies. I think Iâd have to be pretty stoned to consider taking a trip to Cambodia. He left shortly before Cambodia rounded up four Jemaah suspects. In Thailand, black-and-white "identikit" pictures were distributed at all border checkpoints earlier this year, but he managed to slip away. Thai police special branch sources suggested he may have tried to disguise himself as a woman. Iâd hire some more female customs officers to check anyone in a burka, just to be sure. Posted by: Steve 2003-08-15 |
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