The Hindu : Pressure on Jakarta to nab terrorists

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 16, 2002

International

International

Pressure on Jakarta to nab terrorists

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Oct. 15. Even as the Indonesian Defence Minister, Matori Abdul Jalil, identified the Al-Qaeda as the prime suspect behind the latest devastating blast at a nightclub in the holiday-resort of Bali, the international community, led by the U.S. and Australia, today turned the heat on Jakarta to do more against international terrorism.

Indonesia responded by welcoming the offers of support from foreign intelligence agencies while its own investigators struggled to identity the terrorist mastermind(s) who had turned Bali's image as a tranquil tourist haven upside down.

However, many political and religious groups in Jakarta continued to challenge the view that Indonesia had become a hub of international terrorism.

The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, said in his country's Parliament today that Canberra would want the United Nations to designate Jemmah Islamiyah as a terrorist outfit in the context of the Bali tragedy that claimed the lives of over 180 persons, a high proportion of whom were feared to have been Australians.

Jemmah Islamiyah has been identified by the security and intelligence agencies of several key Asia Pacific countries as a South East Asian terrorist network with its suspected nucleus spanning Indonesia itself.

The U.S. President, George W. Bush, made it clear that he would `assume' that the Al-Qaeda had plotted the latest carnage in Bali. Speaking in Washington, he indicated that he wanted Indonesia to respond positively to what he presented as an empirical hypothesis that international terrorists would pose a threat to any country that might harbour them (or happen to do so). The most significant indicator of a heightened international activism as regards Indonesia was the call by the United Nations Security Council to all the member-states of the global organisation to take urgent joint actions to help Jakarta investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of the latest heinous crime in Bali. Prominent among the non-permanent members of the U.N. Security Council is Singapore, which was the first to sound a wake-up call about the ballooning terrorist threat in South East Asia, with particular reference to Indonesia as a possible springboard for the Jemmah Islamiyah.

While the Indonesian investigators spoke of some clues that might link the evidence to the culpability of the Al-Qaeda itself, some other senior Indonesian authorities cautioned against drawing definitive conclusions at this stage.

At least one top Indonesian security official has indicated that two Indonesian nationals had been interrogated, while independent observers pointed out that some suspected Pakistanis too had been questioned in Bali prior to the latest tragedy there.

It was not immediately clear whether the Indonesian authorities would now investigate those suspected Pakistanis with particular reference to the Bali incident.

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