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.