Jan 12, 2016 · ... and at least one police officer was killed by ... The attack then ... It was the first mass attack in Jakarta since the twin bombings of two ...
JAKARTA,
Indonesia — Explosions and gunfire rocked the center of the Indonesian
capital on Thursday in an attack that raised the specter of an expanding
Islamic State presence in Southeast Asia. At least two civilians were
killed, the authorities said, along with five assailants.
The
assailants targeted a police traffic post on a busy thoroughfare, then
set off explosions in an apparent suicide attack outside a Starbucks
coffee shop across the street. Security forces stormed the area, and the
police later said they had arrested four suspects.
The
Islamic State took responsibility for the attack in a statement
released on its official Telegram channel, an encrypted phone app.
The
Islamic State is not known to have carried out terrorist attacks in
Southeast Asia before, but the region has long struggled against Islamic
militancy and several videos have surfaced of Indonesians expressing
support and pledging allegiance to the group.
An explosion and a crowd dispersing
quickly at the site of several explosions in Jakarta, Indonesia, can be
seen in video by the local broadcaster Metro TV.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date January 14, 2016.
Photo by Bagus Indahono/European Pressphoto Agency.
Watch in Times Video »
Indonesia
is the world’s most populous majority-Muslim country, but it has a
secular government and influential Christian, Hindu and Buddhist
minorities. Though it is far from the conflicts of the Middle East, the
country has experienced several terrorist attacks by Islamist militants
that have killed hundreds, including bombings on the resort island of
Bali in 2002 and 2005, and at international hotels in Jakarta in 2003 as well as 2009.
Gen.
Tito Karnavian, chief of the Jakarta Provincial Police and the former
head of the country’s elite national police counterterrorism unit, said
at a news conference on Thursday that the perpetrators of the attack
were linked to leaders of the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria, and warned
that the Islamic State was expanding its operations across the region,
including in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.
He
identified an Indonesian citizen believed to be in Syria as the
organizer. The suspect, Bahrun Naim, is a leader of Katibah Nusantara, a
Southeast Asian-based military unit under the Islamic State, General
Karnavian said.
In
April 2015, Katibah Nusantara fighters captured territory held by
Kurdish forces in Syria, which was a boon for its online drive to
recruit new fighters and supporters among Malay speakers in Southeast
Asia, according to a research paper published last year by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“The
growing reach of Katibah Nusantara could lead to its expanding
influence in Islamic State’s decision-making process, in turn leading
I.S. giving greater priority to Southeast Asia as its war zone,”
according to the paper.
The
police appear to have been aware of Mr. Bahrun for some time. He served
a prison sentence in West Java Province in Indonesia in 2012 for
illegal possession of firearms and explosives, and he is named as the
author of a recent blog post praising the November terrorist attacks in Paris and their high death toll.
The
post, titled “Lessons From the Paris Attacks,” urged his fellow
Indonesians “to study the planning, targeting, timing, coordination,
security and courage of the Paris teams,” according to an article by
Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism in Indonesia, published in
November.
In
an interview, Ms. Jones said there had been “a spike of planning for
violence in Indonesia” over the past six months. At least 16 terrorism
suspects have been arrested in Indonesia in the past month alone, and
the police said they had received information in late November warning
that the Islamic State was planning “a concert” in Indonesia, meaning an
attack.
One
of the two civilians killed in the attack on Thursday was Canadian, and
the other was Indonesian, President Joko Widodo’s cabinet secretary,
Pramono Anung, said at a news conference with the head of the Indonesian
armed forces, Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo, hours after the violence.
The
Police Department’s public relations division said in a post on its
official Facebook page that 23 people had been treated for injuries,
including five members of the police, four foreigners and 14 other
civilians.
The
attack initially appeared to target a traffic police post at a major
intersection, which was heavily damaged by explosions. Video showed a
series of blasts in a parking lot across the street from the police
post, just yards from the front doors of a Starbucks coffee shop and a
Burger King restaurant. Video aired on local television appeared to show
two of the attackers blowing themselves up near the Starbucks.
At
least one assailant fired at the police post. Numerous police vehicles
and ambulances were on the scene of the attack, which occurred on Jalan
Thamrin, one of Jakarta’s main thoroughfares. The area is normally one
of the busiest in the city, but photos circulating on social media after
the attack began showed the wide boulevards nearly empty of cars. The
United States Embassy in Jakarta issued an emergency message telling
Americans to avoid the area.
News Clips: Asia PacificBy REUTERS00:57ISIS Carried Out Jakarta Attack, Police Say
Jeremy Douglas, a United Nations
official based in Bangkok, said he heard explosions as his car was
pulling into the building housing his agency’s Jakarta offices.
“The
driver got a call that something happened at the building,” he said by
telephone. “I got out of the car, and an explosion went off behind the
building. I could feel it.”
Mr.
Douglas, the regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific
for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said he sought refuge
in the offices and heard more explosions from there, as well as
gunfire. “It sounds very close,” he said. He added that he had heard a
total of five explosions.
A
Dutch man was wounded in the attack and was being treated at a
hospital, a spokesman for the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta said. “There is a
Dutch victim, but we don’t know his status,” the spokesman, Nico
Schermers, of the Netherlands Embassy in Jakarta, said by telephone.
A series of explosions and gunfire leaves at least two civilians dead in central Jakarta, along with five assailants.
July 17, 2009
Nearly simultaneous explosions hit two neighboring American hotels in central Jakarta, killing at least nine people.
Oct. 1, 2005
A series of bomb blasts rocks popular tourist areas on the island of Bali, killing at least 20 people.
Sept. 9, 2004
An explosion outside the Australian Embassy kills at least nine people.
Aug. 5, 2003
A car bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta kills at least 12 people.
Oct. 12, 2002
A car bomb detonates in front of a discothèque on Bali, killing 202 people.
Mr.
Schermers, who declined to identify the man, said that bystanders and
people who knew the man had informed the embassy that he had been
wounded. He added that the embassy was in the process of contacting his
family.
President
Joko called the assaults “acts of terror” in a televised statement on
Thursday. “Our nation and our people should not be afraid,” Mr. Joko
said. “We will not be defeated by these acts of terror. I hope the
public stays calm.”
“We
all are grieving for the fallen victims of this incident, but we also
condemn the act that has disturbed the security and peace and spread
terror among our people,” he said.
Mr. Joko later visited the scene of the attacks.
Photo
Guards near the site of an explosion in Jakarta, Indonesia.Credit
Dita Alangkara/Associated Press
Yohanes
Sulaiman, an Indonesian political analyst, said Indonesia’s government
had not done enough to contain Islamist radicals in recent years. He
said the police had “done a good job in preventing such attacks,
considering that Indonesia is kind of a messy place. What the government
hasn’t been doing is to stop the radicalism.”
As
of last year, at least 300 Indonesians had joined the thousands of
foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria to help extremist groups
trying to create an Islamic state there, according to Ms. Jones,
director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, a research
institute based in Jakarta.
Indonesian
extremists are known to have trained and fought in Afghanistan in the
1980s and ’90s, in the southern Philippines and possibly in Bosnia. The
involvement of Indonesian fighters in Syria became more prominent after
an extremist from Borneo named Riza Fardi was killed there last year,
the institute said.
Ken
Conboy, who works for an Indonesian security company and wrote a book
about Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist group that was
linked to Al Qaeda, speculated that the attacks were connected to recent
arrests of terrorism suspects on Java, the Indonesian island that
includes Jakarta.
“All
the people arrested in recent weeks were all linked to each other. The
arrests kept on snowballing,” Mr. Conboy said. “They were supposedly
planning attacks on police stations, Shiite Muslim communities and maybe
the national Police Headquarters” in Jakarta.
Rohan
Gunaratna, an expert on Asian terrorist networks at the S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies, said he had interviewed several
detainees in police custody in Indonesia in late December after the
police disrupted two cells that had been planning attacks.
He said the detainees said they had been planning assaults on the police in Jakarta and wanted to “create chaos.”
Among the detainees were Indonesian citizens and several Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic group from the northwestern Xinjiang region of China, Mr. Gunaratna said.
The
attack took place just yards from Plaza Sarinah, the city’s oldest
modern shopping mall. The mall is one of the few landmarks President
Obama recognized as his motorcade rolled through Jakarta during his 2010 state visit to the capital, where he lived as a child.
Numerous
high-rise buildings, including offices occupied by the United Nations,
lie within yards of the police post that was the apparent target of the
attack, as well as several four- and five-star hotels and Tanah Abang,
Southeast Asia’s largest traditional textiles market. The United States
Embassy is a little over half a mile from the attack site, which is also
near Indonesia’s National Monument and the presidential palace complex.
Muhammad Rusmadi contributed
reporting from Jakarta; Patrick Boehler and Michael Forsythe from Hong
Kong; and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
end quote from:
PHILIPPINESPacificOceanMALAYSIAINDONESIAJakartaIndianOceanAUSTRALIA600 miles“The growing reach of Katibah Nusantara could lead to its expanding influence in Islamic State’s decision-making process, in turn leading I.S. giving greater priority to Southeast Asia as its war zone,” according to the paper.The police appear to have been aware of Mr. Bahrun for some time. He served a prison sentence in West Java Province in Indonesia in 2012 for illegal possession of firearms and explosives, and he is named as the author of a recent blog post praising the November terrorist attacks in Paris and their high death toll.The post, titled “Lessons From the Paris Attacks,” urged his fellow Indonesians “to study the planning, targeting, timing, coordination, security and courage of the Paris teams,” according to an article by Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism in Indonesia, published in November.In an interview, Ms. Jones said there had been “a spike of planning for violence in Indonesia” over the past six months. At least 16 terrorism suspects have been arrested in Indonesia in the past month alone, and the police said they had received information in late November warning that the Islamic State was planning “a concert” in Indonesia, meaning an attack.
Jalan ThamrinUnited NationsofficesMultipleexplosionsreportedJalan Wahid HasyimPlaza Sarinahshopping mall300 feetOne of the two civilians killed in the attack on Thursday was Canadian, and the other was Indonesian, President Joko Widodo’s cabinet secretary, Pramono Anung, said at a news conference with the head of the Indonesian armed forces, Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo, hours after the violence.The Police Department’s public relations division said in a post on its official Facebook page that 23 people had been treated for injuries, including five members of the police, four foreigners and 14 other civilians.The attack initially appeared to target a traffic police post at a major intersection, which was heavily damaged by explosions. Video showed a series of blasts in a parking lot across the street from the police post, just yards from the front doors of a Starbucks coffee shop and a Burger King restaurant. Video aired on local television appeared to show two of the attackers blowing themselves up near the Starbucks.At least one assailant fired at the police post. Numerous police vehicles and ambulances were on the scene of the attack, which occurred on Jalan Thamrin, one of Jakarta’s main thoroughfares. The area is normally one of the busiest in the city, but photos circulating on social media after the attack began showed the wide boulevards nearly empty of cars. The United States Embassy in Jakarta issued an emergency message telling Americans to avoid the area.Continue reading the main story Video
No comments:
Post a Comment