Police announce arrest of terrorist suspect
Police announce arrest of terrorist suspect
Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The National Police dismissed reports of abduction of an Islamic
activist by announcing his arrest on suspicion of illegal
possession of guns and explosives.
Deputy spokesman for the National Police Brig. Gen. Soenarko
said the suspect, Taufik Achmad, was arrested in Kudus, Central
Java on Sunday and had been flown to Jakarta for questioning,
Taufik's wife, Nur Alifah, 34, said neither she nor any of her
family members had received any arrest warrant. They said Taufik
was abducted by five unidentified assailants in a minivan in
broad daylight on Sunday.
"We have arrested Taufik through proper legal procedures, not
through abduction. We have kept the copy of the arrest warrant
that we gave to his family," Soenarko said.
He asserted the police had sufficient evidence of Taufik's
involvement in a group whose house on Jl. Sri Rejeki in the
Central Java capital of Semarang was raided by the police in July
of this year.
The police seized from the house over 1,000 bomb detonators,
30 bags of potassium chlorate weighing 30 kilograms each, four
boxes of TNT, 65 PETN detonators, 11 shoulder-launched rockets,
more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition, two M-16s, timers,
batteries, maps and documents and arrested nine suspects between
July 4 and July 11 in several cities, including Semarang and
Magelang in Central Java, and Jakarta.
"Taufik managed to escape when police raided the storehouse on
July 11 on Jl. Sri Rejeki. We were only recently able to trace
him," said Soenarko.
The alleged leader of the group, Mustofa who is being detained
in Jakarta, has been identified by the other suspects as the
owner of the detonators and explosives.
National Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar has said two of the
nine suspects were thought to be senior members of Jamaah
Islamiyah (JI), which has been blamed for the Bali blasts last
October and the JW Marriott Hotel bombing on Aug. 5.
Taufik is also linked to another terrorist suspect, Abu
Rusdan, who is now standing trial on charges of harboring Ali
Gufron alias Muklas, who has been sentenced to death in the Bali
Bombing case.
Sutarno, one of Taufik's neighbors, said on Tuesday that he
once saw Taufik with Rusdan.