DEATH ROW BOMBER PLOTTED NEW ATTACK ON SMUGGLED LAPTOP
Times Online - August 24, 2006 The second Bali blast killed 23 people in October 2005. PHOTO: DHARIMA / REUTERS |
By Richard Lloyd Parry
ONE of the plotters of the deadly Bali bombings in 2002 raised funds
for a second attack on the island via an internet connection from his
cell on death row, a senior Indonesian policeman admitted yesterday.
Imam Samudra, who has been sentenced to face a firing squad for his
part in the nightclub attacks that killed 202 Indonesians and foreign
tourists, advised fellow extremists on ways of raising funds for a
second attack last year using a laptop with a wireless internet
connection that had been smuggled into his cell.
The revelation, by Police Colonel Petrus Golose, of Indonesia’s
anti-terror task force, testifies to the extraordinarily lax
conditions, abetted by corruption among wardens, in some Indonesian
jails.
According to Colonel Golose, Samudra communicated with a number of
extremists, one of whom created a website setting out the best ways of
murdering foreigners in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Two of his
contacts, Mohammad Agung Prabowo, and Agung Setyadi, are in custody
after being arrested last week in separate raids on the island of Java.
They have not been charged.
Last year Mr Setyadi, an information technology lecturer who was
conniving with a prison warden, smuggled the computer into the jail in
Bali where Samudra was being held after being sentenced to death for
the first bomb attacks.
Over the course of several months the two remained in touch until
Samudra was moved to a high-security prison an island off Java after
the second Bali attack in October last year which killed 23 people.
“Imam Samudra . . . directed the fundraising for the second Bali
bombing,” Colonel Golose said in Jakarta yesterday. “The laptop allowed
Imam Samudra to chat without restrictions in Ahlussunnah and CafeIslam
chat rooms [both internet chat rooms with Islamic themes]. This took
place before the second Bali bombing.”
Samudra had been due to be shot on Tuesday, along with two other
convicted Bali bombers, Amrozi and Ali Gufron, but their execution was
suspended after the three instructed their lawyers to seek a judicial
review. They are said by the Indonesian authorities to have been
members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a South-East Asian affiliate of al-Qaeda.
Compared with corrective regimes in the West, Indonesia prisons can be
astonishingly lax. Xanana Gusmão, now the President of East Timor,
spent seven years in Cipinang prison in Jakarta after his arrest in
1999 and trial as a guerrilla leader. During that time, supporters
smuggled mobile telephones into his cell and he was able to call his
field commanders and direct the independence struggle through their
satellite telephones.
On Tuesday 18 prisoners on the island of Sumatra managed to escape by blinding their guards with chilli sauce.
Samudra has always been a defiant prisoner. He greeted his conviction
with the words: “Infidels die”, and originally welcomed his death
sentence because it would bring him “closer to God”. Two years ago he
published an autobiography from jail in which he described how to
perpetrate credit card fraud as a means of funding terrorist attacks.
In a chapter entitled “Hacking — Why Not?”, he set out a technique
known as “carding”, and provided website addresses. If you are
successful, he said, you can make more in six hours than a policeman
does in six months — but don’t do it for the sake of money: “Remember,
the main duty of Muslims is jihad in the name of God, to raise arms
against the infidels, especially now the United States and its allies.”
THE BALI BOMBERS
Abdul Aziz alias Imam Samudra, 36, believed to be commander of bombings, cried Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) when sentenced to death on September 10, 2003
Source: Times Online - www.timesonline.co.uk