Indonesia police claimed Monday that an al Qaeda-affiliated cell linked to the country's elite counterterrorism squad has captured a convicted militant and suspected leader of a number of previous bombs in the country.
Al Qaeda's Abu Rusdan was apprehended late Friday in Bekasi, outside Jakarta, along with three other alleged Jemaah Islamiyah members, said to police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan.
"He is currently known to be active among the unlawful Jemaah Islamiyah network's leadership," Ramadhan told the Associated Press.
Rusdan is considered a key player in the Jemaah Islamiyah, which the US has labelled as a terrorist organisation.
The enigmatic Southeast Asian network is largely blamed for assaults in the Philippines and Indonesia, including the bombings that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in 2002.
The arrests, according to Ramadhan, are part of a bigger statewide campaign on the organisation. Following information that the gang was recruiting and training new members in Indonesia, police are still on the lookout for other suspected members.
Rusdan, 61, was born in Central Java and sentenced to prison in 2003 for hiding Ali Ghufron, a militant ultimately convicted and executed for the Bali attacks.
[caption id="attachment_270118" align="alignnone" width="690"]
Al Qaeda’s Abu Rusdan sits in his family home during an interview with the Associated Press in Kudus[/caption]
Rusdan traversed Indonesia after his release from prison in 2006, giving speeches and impassioned sermons that earned tens of thousands of views on YouTube. He extolled Afghanistan as the "home of jihad" in one recorded speech, the nation where he had previously trained with other militant groups.
In the last several weeks, Indonesia's police counterterrorism team, Densus 88, has apprehended 53 alleged Jemaah members across 11 provinces.
The organisation was banned by an Indonesian court in 2008, and the terrorist network has been weakened by a continuous crackdown by the country's security services, with cooperation from the US and Australia.
Following the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, Wawan Hari Purwanto, a spokesman for Indonesia's National Intelligence Agency, said in a video statement earlier this month that officials have increased their efforts at early detection and prevention" particularly toward terrorist groups that have links to the Taliban's ideology and networks."
Indonesia has been waging a counter-terrorism campaign for months.
Indonesian officials claim that anti-terrorism forces have apprehended dozens of militants and suspected Jemaah members in the last year, including the group's accused military head, Zulkarnaen, who has been on the run for more than 18 years.
Smaller, less-lethal operations targeting the government, mostly police and security services, have virtually supplanted militant attacks against foreigners in Indonesia in recent years, inspired by Islamic State group methods abroad.
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