The man taken in for questioning concerning the Bali bombing that claimed 180 lives is making no secret of his anti-American beliefs.
“America and Israel are the real terrorists,” fumed Abu Bakar Bashir, according to Newsweek. “America has a big agenda to fight Islam around the world because Islam has become their main enemy since the fall of communism.”
He claims the CIA planted the bombs that killed the revelers at the Indonesian nightclub.
Bashir went even further, telling the magazine “praise the Lord. Osama bin-Laden is a Muslim hero and warrior of God.”
Bashir is the leader of Jemaa Islamiya, a Muslim group believed to have close ties with bin-Laden’s Al-Qaeda.
Hundreds of Muslims rioted today as Indonesian police officers moved in to arrest the 64 year old. AP photos of Bashir’s supporters, taken today, show several wearing t-shirts depicting bin-Laden, as they shouted anti-American and anti-Western slogans. Another AP shot: “A student of Al-Mukmin school, headed by radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, shows a portrait of Osama bin-Laden which he always carries, and his sandals carved with “USA” and “Israel”, in the town of Solo, central Java, Indonesia, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2002. Al-Mukmin, or the Faithful, school, was founded by radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir who is now in the international spotlight following his arrest in the wake of the Bali terror bombings that killed at least 184 people and injured more than 300.”
The Indonesian authorities say Bashir could also be behind dozens of attacks on Christians and churches throughout the country, which has the world’s largest Muslim population.
Malaysian, Singapore and Filipino police all want to question Bashir, claiming he was behind numerous terror attacks carried out on their soil. Malaysia and Singapore have arrested dozens of members of Jemaa Islamiya.
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(University of Texas at Austin)
“In the 1960s, he ran pirate radio stations that broadcast the call to jihad across the rice paddies of Central Java. In 1971, he established a puritanical Muslim boarding school in the court city of Solo, many of whose graduates have fallen afoul of the law here and elsewhere. And from 1978 to 1982 he was in jail for trying to start an Islamic militia. Shortly after his release, he was convicted again – for subversive political activity. He fled, along with Abdullah Sungkar, his closest collaborator, to Malaysia to escape prison,” according to the January 30 edition of the Christian Science Monitor. “During their years in exile, the two men gathered a group of like-minded Indonesians, Malaysians, Filipinos, and Singaporeans around them, articulating in writings and teachings their vision for a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia, Singapore intelligence officials say. Sometimes they referred to themselves as the Jemaa Islamiya, or the Islamic Group.”
Since then, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, the group is said to have carried out:
• The devastating October 2002 bombing of a nightclub on the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, which killed more than 180 people, most of them tourists from Australia and other foreign countries. Indonesian and U.S. officials say Jemaa Islamiya may have planned the attack.
• A December 2000 wave of church bombings in Indonesia, which killed 19. Asian intelligence officials say Hambali had a hand in these attacks, and Indonesian officials are set to question Bashir in connection with this anti-Christian campaign.
• A December 2000 wave of bombings in Manila that killed 22. Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, a follower of Bashir who’s thought to be a key Jemaa leader, reportedly confessed to a role in these bombings. In April 2002, he was convicted in the Philippines on unrelated charges of possessing explosives.
Jemaa Islamiya has also been linked to aborted plans to attack U.S., British, and Australian embassies in Singapore, reports the Council.
Bashir denies any links to bin-Laden and says Jemaa Islamiya as a terrorist group does not exist.
However, as the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Herzliya, Israel, points out: “Much of the new evidence against Jemaa Islamiya and the group’s links to al-Qaeda comes from the interrogation of Omar al-Faruq, a senior al-Qaeda operative captured in June in Indonesia. Al-Faruq had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and became al-Qaeda’s operations leader in Southeast Asia, reporting directly to Abu Zubaydah, the network’s chief of operations.”