SE Asia still vulnerable to suicide attacks: Lee
SE Asia still vulnerable to suicide attacks: Lee
Agence France-Presse,Singapore
Southeast Asia remains vulnerable to suicide attacks by "hundreds" of operatives of the Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group despite the arrests of several members, Singapore's elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew said on Friday.
Senior Minister Lee told a conference of Asia-Pacific defense ministers that the United States and its western allies must defeat Islamic militancy in the Arab world by military, economic and other means in order to remove a source of Islamic radicalism in Southeast Asia.
He said the JI has "paid a price" for mounting terrorist strikes in the region such as the bomb attack on the Indonesian resort island of Bali last year, in which 202 people from 21 countries were killed.
About 30 of the perpetrators of the Bali bombings and their accomplices have been arrested with technical help from the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and Australian Federal Police.
"But there are hundreds more still in the region who will regroup and in good time can execute more suicide attacks," Lee told the ministers and armed forces chiefs attending the two-day Asia Security Conference starting Saturday.
Lee, Singapore's founding father and former prime minister, said regional affiliates of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network such as the JI "will certainly try to attack soft targets in Southeast Asia" as their allies have done in Riyadh on May 13 and Morocco three days later.
"The source of Islamic militancy among Muslims in Southeast Asia has been the increasing fanaticism of extremist Muslims in the Arab world that has been exported by Arab extremists to previously moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia," he said.
"This Islamic militancy has taken on a life and dynamic of its own," he said.
To halt this trend, a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians "is a necessary but not a sufficient condition." An end to the conflict will deprive extremists of a rallying point, "but unless militant groups in the Arab countries and Islamic theocracies are seen to fail, JI and other militant groups in the non-Arab Muslim world will continue to recruit extremists," he said.