[Kabar-indonesia] SMH: Terrorists, drug smugglers face longer Indonesia jail terms [+Azahari]

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: The Australian: Bomber on the Line [Australian and Indonesian 
authorities captured the 2002 Bali bombers but the bomb maker continued to elude them. 
Martin Chulov reveals how Jemaah Islamiah's most feared operative was hunted 
to his death - but only after explosives he made killed 40 more people]

Sydney Morning Herald
Monday, October 9, 2006

Terrorists, drug smugglers face longer jail terms

Mark Forbes Herald Correspondent in Jakarta

JEMAAH ISLAMIAH terrorists and Australian drug offenders will spend more 
years 
in jail as a result of Indonesia's decision to curtail sentence remissions.

The Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has approved regulations 
forcing all terrorists, drug offenders and prisoners convicted of other 
serious crimes to serve at least two-thirds of their original sentences.

They will not be eligible for the remissions regularly issued to other 
prisoners until they have served at least a third of their jail terms.

The Herald has obtained a copy of the regulations, which have not been 
announced. They were drawn up after the outcry against large sentence cuts for the 
former Jemaah Islamiah leader Abu Bakar Bashir and terrorists convicted over 
the Bali bombings.

The Australian Government has strongly objected to the sentence cuts for 
terrorists and Bashir, who served only two years and six months for approving the 
first Bali bombing.

Until now all prisoners have automatically received sentence reductions at 
least twice a year, which can halve their jail terms. Normally a prisoner 
sentenced to 20 years could expect to spend 10 years or less in jail. Under the 
changes they would have to serve nearly 14 years.

The guidelines are likely to apply to the convicted cannabis smuggler 
Schapelle Corby and the nine members of the Bali heroin smuggling group sentenced to 
prison terms, who are yet to be granted remissions because they are appealing 
against their sentences.

An Indonesian Justice Ministry official indicated the guidelines would not 
apply to prisoners who have already received remissions, but how they would be 
applied to foreign prisoners, such as Corby, would become a "political issue".

They would probably be enforced against four terrorists recently found guilty 
of assisting the second bombings in Bali last October.

A spokesman for Indonesia's Foreign Ministry said the new rules would be used 
as a guide for when Australian prisoners could be transferred home under a 
proposed prisoner exchange treaty.

They mean that Corby and members of the Bali nine jailed for 20 years would 
probably need to serve more than six years in Indonesia before being eligible 
for sentence cuts or return to Australia.

The new restrictions will also apply to corruption convictions, gross human 
rights abuses and organised transnational crime.

The regulations have been approved by Dr Yudhoyono and Indonesia's Justice 
Minister, Hamid Awaludin, who arrived in Australia yesterday. During his visit 
he will discuss the prisoner exchange treaty.

Australia and Indonesia have been in dispute over when prisoners would be 
eligible for transfer home. Australia has pushed for return after one or two 
years, while Indonesia had wanted them to serve at least half their sentences.

A Justice Ministry official, Sukartono Supangkat, said that the new remission 
regulations would "absolutely" be used to shape the prisoner exchange treaty, 
which officials hope to finalise this year.

They should come into effect by January, he said. -- with Karuni Rompies

-----------------------------------

The Australian
Monday, October 9, 2006

Bomber on the Line

Australian and Indonesian authorities captured the 2002 Bali bombers but the 
bomb maker continued to elude them. Martin Chulov reveals how Jemaah 
Islamiah's most feared operative was hunted to his death - but only after explosives he 
made killed 
40 more people.

IN the months following the Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta in 2003, in 
which 14 people died and 150 were injured at the hands of Jemaah Islamiah, the 
Bali bomb maker Azahari Hussein and accomplice Noordin Mohammed Top knew they 
were the most hunted men in the region.

The Indonesian national police at various times had more than 1500 men on the 
tail of the two JI terrorists. The Australians had more than 50 police on the 
ground, coupled with their satellite technology and the omnipotence of their 
Defence Signals Directorate's supercomputers and the open chequebook of the 
US's CIA. 

It was a formidable armoury for a worthy foe. But they managed to stay ahead 
of them. 

The police and agents knew that both men used Java, a bustling island of more 
than 60 million souls, split into three provinces, west, central and east, as 
their base. Whenever they dropped anchor, it wasn't for long, but they always 
conveyed the impression of a lengthy tenure by paying up to a year's rent in 
advance. 

Top and Azahari would never find their own accommodation. That was a task 
that would always be entrusted to minders. Their willing devotees were always 
young and mostly from poor families who were easily seduced by the cleverness and 
daring of the two antiheroes. 

Indonesian officers believe they almost had Azahari in their grasp at least 
four times. One time, police scrambled to an internet cafe in Jakarta when an 
AFP trace detected him logging on to an email address he was known to use. They 
got there within 20 minutes. He had gone within 10. Perhaps the closest they 
came was a race to a house in the town of Banten, West Java, in December 2004, 
shortly after the arrest of a local who had reluctantly given up an address, 
and about three months after the JI van-bomb attack on the Australian embassy 
in Jakarta, in which 10 people died and 140 were injured. 

By then, more than two years into his flight, Azahari had become adept at his 
own operational security. He had his minders on a check-in system every two 
hours. If they didn't call on schedule, the game was up. And, just in case, he 
had a series of lookouts stationed near the entrances to whichever village he 
was hiding out in, which he figured gave him at least 10 minutes head start if 
he learned the police were on their way. 

Through 2005, the best resources that Australia and Indonesia could throw at 
Azahari couldn't pin him. The world wasn't to hear anything more from him 
until he surfaced later in the year with a trademark bang on another terrible 
night in Bali, the evening of October 1, 2005, just as it had been three years 
earlier. Suicide bombers killed 20 people, six of them Australians, in addition 
to themselves. They maimed almost 140 more. 

>From their new base in Malang, East Java, Azahari and Top were well pleased 
with the work of their latest young recruits. When news of the carnage hit the 
airwaves, both were at home in the small villa at 7 Flamboyan St for which 
they had characteristically paid rent for a year in advance. The villa was in an 
industrial part of town, where people came and went all day. 

As gung-ho as Azahari had become, his close calls with police had made him 
more cautious. The Bali mission was to be carried out without his hands-on 
supervision. His involvement ended with preparing the suicide bombs and, with Top, 
sending the three men on their way with simple instructions. They were to pick 
places full of tourists. Where and when they struck was up to them. 

The eavesdroppers at DSD and the AFP had never fallen off the hunt. But the 
second Bali strikes had given them renewed impetus to nail Azahari once and for 
all. The rest of October 2005 was the most intense period of activity in the 
three-year ongoing work of the Indonesian and Australian counter-terrorism 
teams. On the last day of that month, the 24/7 number-crunching of suspicious 
phones and monitoring of their owners' movements throughout Java that had started 
well before the bombings zeroed in on three numbers. Just as they had for the 
two years prior, Azahari and Top had insisted on watertight operational 
security. SIM cards were swapped up to twice daily, so too the handsets that 
carried them. But they didn't realise that even that sort of behaviour left a 
pattern - eventually. One number, in particular, became of intense interest. 

On November 9, that phone was on the move from the small hillside town of 
Batu, near the East Java city of Malang. Police and the eavesdroppers who guided 
them soon established that the phone seemed to be aboard a bus, headed for the 
East Java city of Semarang. When the bus pulled up, two men were there to 
meet the man with the phone. So, too, were Indonesian detectives. They didn't 
know it then, but the person they were there to meet, Yahya Antoni, was a key 
courier between Azahari and Top. The pair had taken to writing notes to each 
other to avoid their pursuers. 

Yahya got off the bus wearing a backpack bomb. Police swooped, arresting him 
before he could detonate his bomb, and they arrested one of the two men 
waiting for him. The other man gave them the slip and made a run for Top's hideout. 

Yahya may well have been staunchly loyal to Azahari and his cause, but he 
soon gave up his boss. Within two hours, police had their biggest break of the 
past three years. They were as sure as they could be that they had Azahari 
pinpointed to the town of Batu. Indonesia's CIA-trained and sponsored paramilitary 
strike force was mobilised. At 1.15pm the police knocked quietly on the door 
of a house occupied by a Mrs Herawati. 

The local housewife had met her new neighbours several times, but suspected 
nothing. More police started arriving, surrounding the house next door and 
taking up sniper positions. An officer barked a command for the men inside to 
surrender. A gunshot cracked back in reply. For the next hour, gunfire, punctuated 
by several explosions, resounded through the village. 

Midway through the battle, an AFP taskforce officer called an Indonesian 
counterpart in the village to ask him whether the tip had paid off. The shooting 
in the background was the only answer he needed. 

Then a huge explosion jolted the neighbourhood, shaking tiles from the roof 
of 7 Flamboyan St. It was the last sound to come from the house. Herawati saw 
several police clap and shake hands as calm returned. 

Inside the villa, two men lay dead. One had been decapitated by a bomb he was 
wearing. The other lay prostrate, but intact. One bullet had blasted a hole 
in his chest; another had thundered into his thigh. He was easily recognisable. 

Azahari - or to others who knew him, the Evil Professor, the Demolition Man, 
Alan or Lan - had finally met his match. In the villa, police found an arsenal 
of 33 explosive packages that could easily be made into bombs. There was bomb 
residue matching the devices used in Bali five weeks earlier and three jihadi 
videos of smiling suicide bombers before their mission. Staring straight into 
the camera, each of the jihadis had said they were about to embark on a "holy 
mission". 

It seems their last messages were to be used to recruit more bombers, rather 
than tout their deeds to the world. There were several more finds inside the 
ruined home that, for the first time in more than two years, gave police an 
inkling of how the militants were faring. 

Indonesia's new police chief, Sutanto, said later that Top and Azahari had 
raised funds by selling telephone cards, earning up to $680 a day. Two years 
earlier, Sutanto said, police had arrested a bagman who was carrying funds from 
Saudi Arabia. Since then, the masterminds' foreign benefactors had dried up. 

Azahari's death has, for a time at least, quelled the gathering insurgency in 
Indonesia and Malaysia. But his savage reign appears to have left a chilling 
legacy. 

Several of his captured acolytes have told police that Azahari passed his 
renowned bomb-making skills on to a number of up and comers. Top, too, can make a 
bomb. The beast has by no means been subdued. 

Edited extract from Australian Jihad, by Martin Chulov and published by 
Macmillan Australia, $32.95. Chulov is The Australian's Middle East correspondent. 
He was formerly the newspaper's counterterrorism reporter and won a Walkley 
Award for news reporting on the Bali bombings.

sidebar: A Fair Way to Forge Links
  
AFTER the success of the Bali investigation in arresting some of the 
terrorists responsible for the bombings the previous October 12, the Australian 
Federal Police and the Australian Government wanted to build on what they had 
achieved in Indonesia. 
Desperate to avoid any risk of building resentment among the Indonesian 
national police, the military or the national intelligence agency, the BIN, their 
main thrust had been joint training -- placing Australians and Indonesians on 
an equal footing but offering Indonesia the resources of its comparatively 
wealthy neighbour. It was a delicate balancing act in a country where losing face 
means losing any chance of hanging on to a relationship. 

AFP commissioner Mick Keelty had done the late-night legwork in the karaoke 
bars with police chiefs, so too the investigators in Bali with their 
counterparts. 

As in the corporate world, golf was an important part of the 
getting-to-know-you phase. Then police chief General D'ai Bachtiar was partial to the odd nine 
holes when visiting Perth, so too were many of the colonels and inspectors 
who visited Canberra.

But by June 2003, the relationship was about to move to a new level. John 
Howard had agreed to fund an Australia-Indonesia Joint Terrorism Investigation 
Centre, to be opened in the central Java city of Semarang.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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