Indonesia: Captured JI leader promises more terror

“Other cadres out there” and “jihad terror is their obligation”

Jemaah Islamiah leader Abu Dujana, 37, in court this week.

Lindsay Murdoch

ABU Dujana, the self-described military commander of the Islamic extremist group behind the Bali bombings, has a chilling Christmas message for tens of thousands of Westerners in Indonesia, including Australian tourists in Bali.

Asked if more terrorist attacks were planned, the captured leader of Jemaah Islamiah said: “There are other cadres out there … it is their obligation.”

“Bucktooth Bashir was JI-leader for years!”

Abu Dujana has told prosecutors that the controversial Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was the group’s emir, or spiritual leader, for years.

Bashir, cleared by Indonesian courts of any involvement with terrorism, continues to preach anti-Western hatred in Indonesia.
He warned last week of a “disaster” if the three Bali bombers on death row — Amrozi, Imam Samudra and Mukhlas — were executed.

Abu Dujana, a father of four, has known Bashir since 1989, the year he went to Pakistan to train as a terrorist. We meet him at a South Jakarta court, where he faces a possible death sentence on multiple charges for supporting terrorism in Indonesia between early 2004 and June this year, when he was wounded during a shoot-out with Indonesia’s counter-terror police.

Slight and wiry, with a wispy beard, Abu Dujana smiles wryly and declines to answer when pressed on the whereabouts of his friend Noordin Mohamad Top, South-East Asia’s most wanted terrorist, and other JI members wanted over bombings in Indonesia.

The arrest of Abu Dujana and another JI leader, Zarkasih, in central Java on June 9 was a crippling but not knockout blow for JI, which has not carried out a bombing since 2005, security analysts in Jakarta say.

Abu Dujana had arranged for 200 kilograms of chlorate potassium, 12 kilograms of TNT and other explosive material to be sent to Islamic extremists in the central Sulawesi town of Poso, where about 2000 people have been killed in religious fighting since 1999.

When Noordin and other JI terrorists were on the run after masterminding bomb attacks, Abu Dujana gave them shelter and organised fake identity cards.

During questioning in late June and August, he gave investigators detailed information about JI and its splinter groups.

“He gave us more information than what was in the interrogation report,” prosecutor Totok Bambang said. “We gave him the so-called soft approach … we approached his family. We helped them financially.”

Although the capture of JI leaders has fractured the organisation, security analysts in Jakarta warn there are still dangerous terrorists at large, including Noordin and a bomb-making expert called Dulmatin.

Keith Loveard, an analyst with Concord Consulting, an Australian-owned security company based in Jakarta, said that radical Islamic sentiment was growing in Indonesia, driven in part by a decades-old push for the creation of an Islamic state, and by external factors such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Earlier this week dozens of Muslim activists attacked the settlement of Ahmadiyah, an Islamic sect in West Java whose members believe that Muhammad was not the final prophet, contradicting a central tenet of mainstream Islam. Although Australian and other foreign governments continue to issue warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks in Indonesia, hotels in Bali are packed with tourists.

In Jakarta, hundreds of foreigners congregate nightly in nightclubs in well-known expatriate areas such as Bloc M.

Amrozi, Imam Samudra and Mukhlas, who face execution for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, have been given one month to seek clemency from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

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Islamic pressure closing churches in Indonesia 

Because Allah doesn’t like competition: 

(CWNews.com) - The Indonesian Catholic bishops have called public attention to rising Islamic pressure against Christian churches, Vatican Radio reports.

Bishop Martinus Situmorang of Padang, the president of the country’s episcopal conference, is the co-author of a new report on the campaign by Muslim activists to close down Christian churches. The report shows that from 2004 through 2007, 108 churches have been closed because of Islamic pressure.

The report notes that Indonesia’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion and challenged the government to honor that promise, protecting the Christian minority from Muslim extremists.

* Don’t hold your breath…

Catholics constitute just 3% of the population in Indonesia. About 85% of the country’s 220 million people are Muslims, giving Indonesia the world’s largest Muslim population.