Self-confessed Bali bombers map out a sinister trail

Self-confessed Bali bombers map out a sinister trail

Lawrence Bartlett, Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur

Evidence from two self-confessed bombers has mapped out a
sinister trail from the peace of a Malaysian village and the
piety of a rural school to the carnage of the Bali massacre.

Each new link that falls into place in the investigation of
the blast which killed more than 190 people leads back to the
village, the school and relationships developed by Indonesians
living in exile in Malaysia.

At least four of the main characters so far identified as
central to the probe share the Malaysian connection, a bitter
pill for the government of this moderate Islamic country.

It was in Malaysia that the two who have admitted involvement
in the Bali attack, Amrozi and Imam Samudra, came in contact with
people and projects linked to the Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist
organization.

JI was allegedly being nurtured by two of their countrymen,
Muslim clerics Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali, and Abu Bakar
Ba'asyir, who had fled the Indonesia of former dictator Soeharto,
seen by fundamentalists as an oppressor of Islam.

Hambali arrived in Malaysia in 1985, left to fight in the
anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan from 1987 until 1991, and
returned to settle in the quiet village of Sungai Manggis about
an hour's drive from the capital Kuala Lumpur.

There he and fellow villager Ba'asyir built the JI
organization into a terrorist network inspired by what Hambali
had learnt from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, says
security analyst Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al Qaeda.

Imam Samudra, described as a leading figure in the Bali
bombing, told Indonesian police this week he was a neighbor of
Hambali's in Malaysia.

Amrozi, a self-confessed lower-level operative, attended a
religious school run by Ba'asyir, Luqmanul Hakiem, near Ulu Tiram
in southern Malaysia.

The isolated school, set among palm oil plantations, was
closed down by Malaysia in January, but by then the key
Indonesian suspects had returned home after the fall of Soeharto
in 1998.

Ba'asyir, Samudra and Amrozi are now all in detention, with
Ba'asyir held on allegations of involvement in a series of
bombings of Indonesian churches on Christmas Eve 2000. Hambali is
at large.

Some analysts have suggested that suppression under Soeharto
gave rise to the militancy which grew among Indonesian exiles in
the Malaysian village and school and exploded violently in Bali.

But Gunaratna, dismisses this. "It is a fact that Soeharto was
hard and these people left Indonesia and developed the
organization outside.

"But it was not a response to his oppression. I believe in any
case these people would have developed this kind of structure
because al-Qaeda is a very violent organization and infected
groups like JI.

"Malaysia's role was a passive one, not active. It was
Indonesians who developed JI in Malaysia. All key leaders of JI
are Indonesians."

That is of little comfort in a country which winces every time
Malaysia is mentioned in connection with the Bali killers.