Indonesian police identify 2 men involved in Jakarta terror attacks

Indonesian authorities have identified two of the five terrorists killed in Thursday’s attacks in downtown Jakarta, including one whose face was clearly captured by press photographers as he brandished a pistol among a crowd of onlookers and police.

The man with the gun, who was pictured in a black T-shirt, blue jeans and a baseball cap and carrying a backpack, was identified as Afif, alias Sunakim.

Local media reported that National Police Chief Inspector Gen. Badrodin Haiti said Afif had been arrested in 2010 for suspected terror activities in Aceh province, in northern Sumatra. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but was freed in September 2015.

He is believed to have turned even more radical after meeting another convicted terror suspect, Aman Abdurahman, in Cipinang prison in Jakarta. It was there he was indoctrinated into the ideology of Islamic State.

Another man suspected of helping to carry out Thursday’s attacks in and around the Starbucks outlet at the popular Gedung Cakrawala shopping complex in the city center was identified as Muhammad Ali.

Ali was also captured by photographers and CCTV walking together with Afif toward a crowd of curious onlookers which had gathered near a police post in the middle of a busy intersection opposite Gedung Cakrawala, following a second bomb blast that killed three people and injured one police officer.

Ali was pictured dressed in light blue shirt and dark vest with a black cap on his head and a pistol in his gloved hand. A photographer from Tempo, a local daily, captured him shooting at a policeman at close range before he and Afif ran toward Starbucks’ parking area. Both were killed during a shoot-out with the police.

Police raided both of their houses on Friday. Afif’s was in Kerawang, West Java, while Ali had been living in Perkampung Pesanggrahan, Meruya, also West Java.

Authorities claim the mastermind behind the bombings and shootings that also killed two people, including a Canadian, besides the five terrorists, was 32-year-old Muhammad Bahrun Naim Anggih Tantomo, an Islamic State follower now based in Syria.

He is believed to have recruited Afif, Tempo quoted Badrodin as saying. Bahrun Naim is thought to have funded their activities.

Like Afif, Bahrun Naim has had brushes with the authorities before. He was arrested in 2010 in Solo on suspected terror activities, but he was only charged in court for illegal possession of ammunition. He was sentenced to two and a half year in prison in 2011. After he was freed in 2014, he left for Syria to join the Islamic State militant group.

Local media quoted Jakarta Police Chief Inspector Gen. Tito Karnavian saying Thursday that the Jakarta carnage could be Bahrun Naim’s attempt to shore up his credentials in a battle to lead Islamic State’s Southeast Asia branch.

Police stepped up their crackdown on his network by raiding several premises across the country in the wake of the attacks.

“Two people were arrested during a raid in Cirebon (West Java Province) and one of them was related to one of the perpetrators in the Jakarta attacks. From their house, we seized a number of pieces of evidence, including an Islamic State flag and some recitations from the Quran, books and brochures related to Islamic State. They communicated with Bahrun Naim,” National Police spokesman Anton Charliyan told reporters late Friday.

Explosions rocked Jakarta on Thursday, with a Starbucks outlet and a nearby police post targeted by bombers, following which the attackers began shooting at police and onlookers. The Starbucks explosion is believed to have been a suicide attack, but the method of the attack on the police box is still being investigated.

Besides the seven fatalities, 26 people were also injured in Thursday’s carnage, of which six were policemen.

Budi Suryanto from the Forensic Laboratory Center said, based on the evidence collected from the scene of the crime, the perpetrators used “low explosive bombs.”

“They used a 3-kg LPG tube as the casing, a detonator and light bulbs, in which the wires were connected to batteries that would explode when the bulbs were broken. The batteries were connected to an accumulator. So, the explosive has a big power,” he said, “They put explosive powder, nails, bolt-nuts and iron plates in the LPG tube.”

“From the database we collected, the explosives are similar to those on the incident in Beji, Depok and in the Cirebon Police Headquarters,” he added.

Budi was referring to the 2012 incident where a makeshift bomb accidentally exploded in a house in Beji, Depok in the outskirts of Jakarta. The Cirebon incident in West Java in 2011 involved a suicide bomber who detonated himself at a mosque inside the compound of the local police headquarters, killing himself and injuring 25 others.

==Kyodo

Category: Daily Witness, National