National Police chief warns of fresh terror attacks

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Police have warned that terrorist groups within the country might be planning another attack as there has been an increase in communications between them.

National Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar said on Thursday, as quoted by AFP, that police detected the communications increase due to the hard work of intelligence agencies who were monitoring the militants' activities.

Although the intelligence could not pin-point the militants exact whereabouts due to Indonesia's vast area, he believed that the militants were in Indonesia and that they were in contact with others overseas.

Due to the warning, Da'i said that embassies and other potential targets such as shopping malls and international schools would have to maintain heightened security until the threat subsided.

The United States and Australian governments issued warnings last week that bomb attacks were planned against hotels frequented by foreigners.

Although Da'i did not reveal the identities of the terrorist groups making contact between each other, he said that they were responsible for a series of deadly attacks in the country including the Bali bombings in 2002.

Da'i also admitted that it was difficult to find and arrest the terrorists, including two top Malaysian fugitives Noordin Mohd. Top and Azahari Husin, since the country was so large and the fact that certain people had been helping the fugitives to hide.

Separately, Southeast Asia project director of the International Crisis Group Sidney Jones, in an article published in The Asian Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, said that there might be a complex web of personal alliances among Indonesian militants since they were born out of communal conflicts and strengthened by military training at home and abroad.

Five police officers guarding a post on the border between Muslim and Christian areas on Seram island, another area with a similar history to Poso, were shot in the head in close range.

The people behind these attacks might be related to each other as she said that one of the men arrested for the Seram attack revealed that he had undertaken military training in the Philippines and that he had lived in Poso for quite some time.

After the attack in Maluku, it is possible that the militants might turn their attention to Western targets.