Malaysian bomb fugitive's life in the shadows
Malaysian bomb fugitive's life in the shadows
Mark Bendeich, Reuters/Kuala Lumpur
Azahari bin Husin, one of Asia's most-wanted Islamic militants and suspected bomb mastermind, is an expert at suffering. It has been his companion for years.
The Malaysian electronics expert, reported to have blown himself up during a raid by Indonesian police on Wednesday, is thought to have played a hand in killing hundreds of people since he enlisted to the cause of militant Islam in the early 1990s.
He leaves behind an informal charge sheet that is a roll-call of some of Asia's most deadly recent terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people on the Indonesian resort island.
He is also accused of helping plot the 2003 suicide bombing at Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel, killing 12, and last year's bombing outside the Australian embassy in Indonesia, killing 10.
Suffering has surrounded Azahari in other ways as well.
The former university lecturer's wife wages a lonely battle with throat cancer and his two young children grow up in Malaysia under the constant shadow of suspicion and police surveillance.
A spokesman for his wife, Noraini, declined to comment on Wednesday, saying the family was awaiting results of DNA tests on the remains of the seven militants killed in the raid in East Java province, Malaysia's state news agency reported.
Last month, when Reuters tried to call on Noraini at her mother's house in a drab industrial area northeast of Kuala Lumpur, she was said by her family to be too ill to speak.
Her neighbors, though, told a familiar tale of bewilderment: how could a man they regarded as quiet and unassuming turn out to be a bomber?
"He behaved as a normal person so it was a surprise to read he is a bomber," said Haji Maamour, a 65-year-old retired factory worker who lives directly across the street from Noraini.
"He liked to jog, but he mostly kept to himself unless greeted. He's quite smart and sometimes we talked about science but never about making bombs," he added.
Azahari, thought to be in his 40s, was a regular visitor to Noraini's family home in Ulu Kelang before he slipped into the arms of militant network Jemaah Islamiyah in the early 1990s.
At around that time or sometime before, says one Asian security source, he was quietly suffering from depression.
"He had a tough experience when he was preparing for his thesis and he was in depression and was approached by some people," the source said, declining to give further details.
Azahari holds a doctorate from the University of Reading in Britain. He studied for the doctorate in the late 1980s.
He joined Jemaah Islamiyah, which wants to set up an Islamic state in parts of Southeast Asia, in 1993, and attended rebel military-training camps in the southern Philippines, then plagued by a Muslim insurgency, and in Afghanistan, the source said.
While training in the Philippines, on Mindanao island, Azahari got to know another Malaysian who was to later share top billing on the region's most-wanted list, Noordin M. Top.
Noordin, like Azahari, had only recently embraced militant Islam and the cause of Jemaah Islamiyah. Noordin also had personal demons, though his were financial, the security source said.
Together they went on to become the scourge of Southeast Asian security forces, evading capture -- unlike their mentor, expert bomb-maker Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was arrested in Thailand in 2003 and is now in U.S. custody.
If Azahari is still alive, security forces would prefer him to be captured and questioned like Hambali -- and possibly help them illuminate more of the shadowy world of Jemaah Islamiyah.