Two Arrested in Indonesia over Suicide Terror Plot
Local Editor
Indonesian police said Friday they arrested two men allegedly involved in a planned New Year suicide attack in Jakarta.
One of the arrested is Indonesian, named as Arif Hodayatullah. Media sources reported that he was captured near the capital for driving a car without a license plate and found several books about bomb-making inside the vehicle.
An anti-terror squad raided his house in West Java, where they arrested the other man who appeared to be Chinese. He was identified only as Alli, and police confiscated a suicide vest and material to assemble a bomb.
An unnamed police source said Alli was believed to be a bomb-maker and was chosen to carry out the suicide attack.
In the context, national police spokesman Anton Charliyan said: "We also found a design [of where the attack would be carried out], but we have only found one, we need to investigate more."
The arrests come at a time of heightened alert after police arrested several other suspected extremists.
Back on Monday, police arrested in Java five suspects from a cell linked to "ISIS", and four from another cell linked to the so-called "Islamic Organization" terror network, responsible for several major attacks in Indonesia.
Preemptively, the country deployed more than 150,000 military and police personnel during the Christmas and New Year period and increased security at its airports after a threat was directed at one serving Jakarta.
For his part, Hodayatullah confessed that he was instructed by a man named Bahrunnaim, a militant residing in Syria, to help Indonesians wishing to join the "ISIS" group.
Indonesia had suffered several major bomb attacks by extremist radicals between 2000 and 2009, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
However, a crackdown weakened the most dangerous extremist networks.
Yet the emergence of "ISIS" sparked alarm that Indonesians returning from battlefields in the Middle East could revive them.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
