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Paras Indonesia, November, 10 2005 @ 12:38 am

Police Revise Details Of Azahari's Death

Roy Tupai

After initially saying that Indonesia's most wanted terrorist Azahari Husin blew himself up to avoid capture, police on Thursday (10/11/05) said he was shot dead while trying to detonate his suicide vest.

''He wanted to do it, but he was shot by police first... His body is still intact,'' said National Police chief General Sutanto.

The police chief also lowered the death toll from three to two in Wednesday afternoon's police raid on Azahari's hideout in Batu, outside the city of Malang in East Java province.

He said the second fatality was one of Azahari's accomplices, Arman, who successfully detonated his suicide vest, causing a blast that ripped his body to pieces and blew the roof off the house that the terrorists had rented for the past two or three months.

Sutanto said police found 30 small bombs inside the house that were ready to explode, including several placed in backpacks. The discovery of the bombs led police to believe that Azahari was planning a new wave of suicide bombings.

In addition to the bombs, police also found firearms, a computer, prayer mats, Islamic robes, maps, video compact discs, books and other documents.

Azahari (48), an electronics expert who studied bomb-making in Afghanistan, is a Malaysian citizen and a senior member of al Qaeda-linked regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah. He was accused of making bombs for a series of terror attacks in Indonesia that killed over 250 people since 2000.

Sutanto said Arman had learned bomb-making from Azahari, adding that police were further investigating his background.

He said Azahari had been positively identified after checking the corpse's fingerprints with records of those taken when the terrorist entered Indonesia in 1998 and when he was a teenager in Malaysia in the 1960s. "So the perpetrator at the crime scene is definitely Azahari... So a DNA test might not be carried out, as a fingerprint analysis is more accurate."

The police chief said Azahari had been making small deadly bombs because he lacked enough money to make bigger explosive devices. "He was running out of funds, so he made small bombs because big bombs require big funds."

He said Azahari had made 42 bombs at the house. Eleven of them were thrown at the police during Wednesday's raid, while another had been taken to the Central Java capital of Semarang by a militant identified as C.H. Police arrested C.H. on Wednesday morning and he gave them the location of the Batu hideout. Separately, state news agency Antara reported that two suspected associates of Azahari were arrested in Semarang on Wednesday. They were identified as Muji and Dwi Widiyanto.

Journalists were able to view the heads of Azahari and Arman as their bodies were removed from the Batu house in yellow bodybags. The corpses were to be taken to a police hospital in the East Java capital of Surabaya and later flown to Jakarta.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono congratulated the National Police on the elimination of Azahari and instructed them to continue hunting down other fugitive terrorists, including Noordin Mohammad Top.

"The president congratulated the police and ordered them to search for other terrorists, especially Noordin," said presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng, adding that Sutanto had telephoned the president shortly before 1pm to inform him of the positive identification of Azahari.

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