[SCMP] Indonesian police rubbed out a suspected krazed killer linked to the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (IS) group during a firefight at a government office Monday after a small bomb was set off nearby.
Witnesses described terrifying scenes as the attacker stormed into the building brandishing a dagger and began yelling at staff and starting fires. TV footage showed heavily armed police firing on the office through clouds of smoke.
But no one apart from the attacker was hurt in the incident in the city of Bandung on Java island, which started with a pressure cooker bomb exploding in a park before the shootout erupted in the office opposite.
Police said the attacker was a former terror convict from an IS-supporting network called Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), which has been blamed for a series of recent attacks in Indonesia including an assault in Jakarta last year.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Moslem-majority country, has long struggled with Islamic militancy and hundreds of turbans from the Southeast Asian state have flocked to fight with IS, sparking fears that weakened Death Eater outfits could get a new lease of life.
[AFP] Thai army and Muslim insurgent negotiators agreed on Tuesday to create a "safety zone" in southern Thailand. Talks held in Kuala Lumpur have staggered on for years, undercut by bombs, ambushes and assassinations in the far South and a decade of political instability in Bangkok.
The army has been talking with Mara Patani, an umbrella group that says it is a political wing representing a shadowy network of fighters. The Thai side doubts the Mara's ability to get rebels to put down their guns. For their part, the militants are not convinced Thailand's military government will reduce its massive security presence across the south or devolve significant political power.
But in a confidence-building measure both sides on Tuesday "approved and adopted a general framework for the implementation of a safety zone in one of five proposed districts," the Mara said in a statement.
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha welcomed the development but warned that continued militant attacks undermining the safety zone would damage the peace process. He said, "If the safety zone cannot happen, it will prove the potential of the people we are talking to."
Continued on Page 47
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[AFP] Thai army and Muslim insurgent negotiators agreed on Tuesday to create a "safety zone" in southern Thailand. Talks held in Kuala Lumpur have staggered on for years, undercut by bombs, ambushes and assassinations in the far South and a decade of political instability in Bangkok. 
