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Bali Bomber Dies As Police Attack Hideout

Posted on: Thursday, 10 November 2005, 09:00 CST

By Gethin Chamberlain

ONE of the men behind the Bali bomb attack which killed more than 200 people was yesterday reported to have blown himself up to escape capture.

Azahari bin Husin was known to wear an explosive belt around his waist to avoid being taken alive. He died along with several other suspects in a fierce gunbattle with Indonesian police.

General Sutanto, the national police chief, said Azahari might have been shot dead by police or could have killed himself after an elite anti-terrorism unit surrounded his villa hideout in the town of Batu in East Java province.

Azahari was the suspected brains behind several bomb attacks on western targets in Indonesia and the top bomb-maker in Jemaah Islamiah, a shadowy network seen as the regional arm of al-Qaeda.

He studied mechanical engineering at Adelaide University in Australia but failed to graduate. Instead, he moved on to the University of Technology in Malaysia and then to Reading University where he obtained a PhD in statistics.

An Australian newspaper quoted a former student describing him as "a bit of a mad bugger" with a "healthy disrespect for authority".

His death was the second blow to the terrorist network in the region, coming two days after security services foiled what they claimed was a plot to bomb a number of targets in Australia.

Indonesian police said that Azahari, an electronics expert, designed and supervised the making of the car bomb that caused the most damage in the 2002 bomb attacks on Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

He has moved between Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia in recent years, eluding authorities who have been chasing him since 2001.

Ken Conboy, a Jakarta analyst who wrote a recent book on Jemaah Islamiah, said Azahari was among the top five leaders of the south- east Asian terrorist group.

"It's a huge success if they got him," he said. "Unfortunately, if he's been shot dead there would be nothing to exploit unless they found something in his safe house."

Aryanto Budihardjo, a police spokesman, said the villa had been under surveillance before yesterday's gunbattle.

"Our members approached the house and were shot [at] from the inside. We fired warning shots and then we shot at the house. Then they hurled 11 bombs at us," he said.

Nearby residents said the gunbattle erupted without warning. "It was like a war," said one.

Besides the blasts three years ago, police accuse Azahari of being a key figure behind the 2003 suicide bombing at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta that killed 12 and a bombing outside the Australian embassy last year that killed ten.

Jemaah Islamiah wants to set up an Islamic state in parts of south-east Asia. Its network has been disrupted by arrests since the 2002 bombings, although security experts have said it is still a threat.

Source: Scotsman, The

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