Indonesian police shoot suspected militants

Reuters

RAIDED: Indonesian anti-terror police carry the body of a suspected militant into an ambulance in Pamulang, on outskirts of Jakarta.

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Indonesian police shot dead three suspected militants during two raids on the outskirts of the capital targeting a top militant wanted over the 2002 Bali bombings, police and a witness said on Tuesday.

Police sources said the raids in Pamulang in Banten province were part of a series of assaults on a suspected Islamic militant group in Aceh province targeting Dulmatin, a fugitive Indonesian member of militant group Jemaah Islamiah.

The raids come ahead of a visit by US President Barack Obama on March 20-22 to the world's most populous Muslim nation.

National Police spokesman Edward Aritonang said the suspect in the first raid was thought to be "linked with terrorist incidents that police were investigating" but police were still identifying the body.

A police source who was involved in the operation and who declined to be identified told Reuters police "strongly suspect it was Dulmatin".

TV footage showed police carrying an orange body bag to an ambulance after the raid on a two-storey building which housed a small Internet and copying business at street level.

Police said a second raid was conducted nearby about an hour later, targeting members of the same group. Two suspects were shot and two detained.

Metro TV showed footage of a motorbike lying on its side that the suspects were believed to have tried to flee on and said that a bomb had been found.

A Reuters photographer at the scene saw two body bags being carried away by police.

Dulmatin is wanted over the 2002 Bali bombings and was believed to have been hiding in the southern Philippines.

Indonesia's counter-terrorism unit, Detachment 88, has launched a series of raids across the archipelago following the discovery of a militant Islamic training camp in Aceh last month. Books on Jihad, rifles and military uniforms were found during the raids in which 19 suspected members of the group were detained in Aceh and Java.

Two suspects and three police have been killed during the ongoing hunt for more suspects.

Dulmatin was thought to be in the Philippines working with the Islamist Abu Sayyaf group, said Noor Huda Ismail, an Indonesian expert on radical Islamist groups.

"It would be a major blow for the violent movement in Indonesia if it was Dulmatin. However, it would also send a disturbing signal to us that there are many terrorists who manage to enter Indonesia from abroad," Ismail said.

Ismail said that Dulmatin had the capability to succeed Noordin Mohammad Top, a Malaysian-born militant and bomb maker killed by police last year during a raid in central Java.

Top, who is believed to have set up a violent splinter group of Jemaah Islamiah, masterminded a series of bombings including suicide attacks on luxury hotels in Jakarta last July.

Mardigu Wowi Prasantyo, another expert on militants in Indonesia, said Dulmatin had expertise in bombings, sniper attacks and guerrilla fighting.

Indonesia has been dealing with militant attacks for the past decade from groups such as Jemaah Islamiah, some of whose members trained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the southern Philippines.

A Saudi man and an Indonesian are on trial in Indonesia in connection with the hotel bombings in Jakarta last year which killed 11 people, including the suicide bombers.

Police have said that the hotel bombings pointed to the re-establishment of a connection between al Qaeda and local militants.

Al Qaeda helped fund the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2003

J W Marriott hotel bombings in Jakarta, which killed scores of Indonesians and Westerners, police say.

- Reuters