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| Southeast Asia |
| JI back in action: Singapore |
| 2003-11-22 |
| The al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network is training new leaders and likely planning more suicide attacks similar to those in Bali and at Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel, Singapore’s home affairs minister said in remarks released Friday. Tap, tap, there goes my surprise meter ... The recent arrests of key Jemaah Islamiyah leaders have only temporarily set back the group, and a new generation of leaders is being trained in Pakistan and Indonesia, Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng said. That would seem to imply that Hanbali’s bro and Co weren’t at the top of pyramid, at least as far as the Pakistani wing of group goes. Jemaah Islamiyah ’’as an organization, is only disrupted. It is by no means eliminated,’’ Wong told a security conference in Hawaii on Thursday. His speech was released in Singapore on Friday. The group, a loose network of Islamic militants extending across Southeast Asia, has been blamed for the Marriott blast in August, which killed 12 people, and the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002 that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists. ’’Our intelligence assessment is that (Jemaah Islamiyah) elements are on the run,’’ he said. They ’’are likely to plan more suicide bomb attacks along the lines of Bali and the recent Hotel Marriott bombing in Jakarta.’’ More than 200 Jemaah Islamiyah members have been arrested in five countries since the Bali blasts and other attacks. The group suffered one of its biggest blows in August with the arrest in Thailand of Hambali, its alleged operations chief. Wong singled out as a serious threat Azahari bin Husin, a British-educated Malaysian mathematician and master bomb maker who is believed to have played a key role in the Bali blasts. Yet we heard the other day that bin Husin works for Zulkarnaean, who seems to have taken up Hanbali’s role as the JI supremo. Should be interesting to see who’s really on top ... |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |