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The Jakarta Post


The Jakarta Post, 11/21/2005 6:48:41 PM

Indonesia attacks funded by phone card sales: Police

JAKARTA (Reuters): Militants in Indonesia are short of cash and are funding terrorist operations by selling mobile phone vouchers after other options including sources in Saudi Arabia dried up, the National Police chief said on Monday.

Gen. Sutanto told legislators who visited the national police headquarters that the Saudi funding stopped last year after a series of arrests in Indonesia. He did not name the Saudi sources.

"They are facing financial difficulties now. Their way out is by selling (cellphone) vouchers, for which they get a daily profit of up to five million rupiah (US$500)," Sutanto said.

"The money is distributed through couriers who do not know each other. This system differs from Imam Samudra's way of robbing people who were considered infidels," Sutanto said, referring to one of the main plotters behind the nightclub bombings in Bali in 2002 that killed 202 people.

Firebrand Samudra is on death row. Before the 2002 Bali attacks he robbed a number of gold shops, police said.

Prepaid mobile phone vouchers have come under the spotlight in Indonesia because anyone can buy a number without giving details of their identity and the numbers are often used by militants forcommunications and pranksters for making hoaxes.

Shops selling such vouchers are found across the nation of 220 million people, even in small villages. Indonesia has said it plans to regulate their sale.

Sutanto's comments confirm the views of some security experts that militants have turned to smaller operations because of cash-flow problems.

The last attacks, in restaurants in Bali on Oct. 1, were carried out by three suicide bombers wearing explosives-laden backpacks. Until then militants had preferred to use car bombs.

All major bomb attacks in Indonesia in recent years have been blamed on Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), a shadowy network seen as the regional arm of al-Qaeda.

Sutanto did not say how he knew about the militant funding, but police have gleaned much information from raids this month on terror hideouts on Indonesia's main island of Java. (***)

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