2 Malaysians hunted in bombings in Bali
By Raymond Bonner The New York Times
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2005
Forensic police continued the painstaking search for clues Monday,
sifting through the sand under the tables on the beach here where suicide
bombers killed more than a dozen diners Saturday evening.
On the larger canvas of the vast archipelago, police and
counterterrorism units were chasing after two Malaysians who have become the
most-hunted men in Southeast Asia.
The two men, Azhari Husin, 48, who was educated in Australia and
England, and Mohammad Noordin Top, in his mid-30s with a reputation for being
an effective recruiter and fundraiser, were once part of Al Qaeda's operational
network in Southeast Asia. But with that network largely destroyed, they are
now believed to be operating on their own, terrorism experts say.
They have demonstrated a staggering ability to avoid capture and an
extreme audaciousness, publicly sketching terrorist targets preceding an
attack, and being on site when the bomb went off.
"They are definitely at the top of our list of people we are
looking for," Dino Djlal, a senior aide to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
of Indonesia, said in a brief telephone interview Monday evening.
"We believe they are the masterminds of the previous bombings," he
said, referring to the nightclub bombings here in October 2002, the suicide
bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003 and of the
Australian Embassy in Jakarta in September 2004.
The emergence of these two men as prime suspects, and the nature of
the latest bombings here, is evidence of a new face of terrorism in Southeast
Asia, terrorism experts say. The fixation until now has been on organizations
like Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, which have carried out spectacular attacks
with large-scale bombs usually borne in vehicles.
Now, with both of those organizations severely weakened, the
concern is shifting to individuals, like Husin and Top, who have their own
loose informal structures.
During raids last summer, Indonesian authorities discovered, and
interrupted, two groups that were planning attacks in Jakarta. The two groups
had no knowledge of each other, according to Indonesian investigators.
In one of the most dramatic shifts, the targets of many of the
groups now are not primarily the United States and its allies, but local
governments.
The Saturday bombings, which included a bomb that went off in
Raja's restaurant in Kuta, eight kilometers, or five miles, from here, had the
primary goal of hurting the Balinese economy and the Indonesian government,
said a private security official who has long studied terrorist acts here and
retains close ties to Western counterterrorism agencies. He declined to be
identified, as is customary for individuals in his line of work.
Nearly all of those killed and wounded were Indonesians, and that
was not by chance, he said.
At a news conference in Kuta on Monday afternoon, the Bali police
said they had still not identified the three suicide bombers. Pictures of their
severed heads have appeared on television and in newspapers in the past 24
hours, but no calls have been received from the public, said a Bali police
spokesman, Brigadier General Soenarko.
The men suspected as masterminds, Husin and Top, have been famously
adept at avoiding capture. They have been stopped by police on numerous
occasions, only to be let go because the policeman on the spot did not know who
he had.
Husin is also considered a master of disguises. In one of the most
common pictures of him, he is shown wearing rimless glasses and looks
professorial.
He was once a professor at the University of Technology in
Malaysia, where he had a reputation as an "irrepressible joker of a man," wrote
an Australian journalist, Sally Neighbour, who has a chapter about Azhari in
her book, "In the Shadow of Swords."
As a teenager, Azhari (sometimes spelled Azahari) went to Australia
and attended Adelaide University, where he showed a greater interest in
motorbikes, sports and partying than in studying.
He later earned a doctorate from Reading University in England,
with a thesis titled "The Construction of Regression-based Mass Appraisal
Models: a Methodological Discussion and an Application to Housing Submarkets in
Malaysia."
Back in Malaysia, he met some emerging radical Islamists, including
Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, and Riduan Isamuddin,
better known as Hambali, who was Al Qaeda's senior operative in Southeast Asia.
All three men played a role in the first Bali attacks in 2002,
which killed 202, Indonesian and American law enforcement officials have said.
Top was also part of the group, according to numerous accounts.
Top once boasted to a man he was recruiting to take part in the
bombing of the Australian Embassy that he was "the most wanted man in Southeast
Asia," according to Sidney Jones, who has written extensively about terrorism
in Southeast Asia for the International Crisis Group.
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