THE NEW YORK TIMES, January 10, 2003
TERROR NETWORK
Radical Islamists a Threat to Southeast Asia Even if Al Qaeda Is
Eliminated, Singapore Says
By RAYMOND BONNER
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Jan. 9 — Even if the United States is successful in dismantling
Al Qaeda, radical Islamic groups in Southeast Asia will be capable of further terrorist
acts like the recent one in Bali, the Singaporean government said today.
Some of those groups were around before Al Qaeda and have local agendas, but their
linkup with the organization has made them more deadly, the government said.
"With their radical agenda and their enhanced skills acquired from Al Qaeda, these
groups, if left unchecked, will pose a grave threat to the security of Southeast Asia for
a long time to come," the government said in a 50-page report on the threat of
terrorism in the region.
The group with the closest links to Al Qaeda, and therefore potentially the most
dangerous, is Jemaah Islamiyah, the report says, underscoring what officials from
several countries said in recent interviews. Its members were trained at Qaeda camps
but are considered capable of acting without orders from Qaeda leaders.
In one of the most revealing sections of its report, the Singapore government said
many of the men recruited into Jemaah Islamiyah, which is headed by an Indonesian
cleric and which the authorities say was behind the attack in Bali, were not
impoverished or uneducated, but smart and well employed.
The report, available on the Web site of Singapore's Home Affairs Ministry
(www2.mha.gov.sg), described the group's recruitment as painstaking.
In assessing the current threat from radical Islamic terrorism, the report identified
three men it said should be captured. At the top of the list was Riduan Isamuddin,
better known as Hambali, an Indonesian who is believed to be the link between Al
Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah.
The Singaporean government is considered to have the best intelligence and security
apparatus in Southeast Asia, and this report seems to underscore that thousands of
men are at large who have been imbued with Al Qaeda's ideology and could carry out
a terrorist act.
"We give them high marks for credibility," a senior American diplomat in the region
said about the Singaporean security officials.
Indonesian and Western investigators are now confident that they know who carried
out the bombing of two nightclubs in Bali on Oct. 12, which killed nearly 200 people,
and that the Indonesians have arrested most of the suspects. But they say that they
do not yet know who gave the orders, and that they have not found a direct link to Al
Qaeda.
Interrogations after the Bali bombing have indicated that there are 5,000 Islamic
extremists in Indonesia, all of them potential recruits for terrorist acts, a senior Asian
diplomat said today.
Most of them are thought to be members of Jemaah Islamiyah, which is headed by
Abu Bakar Bashir, a 64-year old cleric, who was arrested by the Indonesian police
after the Bali attack but who has not been directly linked to that act.
The Singaporean government has detained 31 men who it says are members of
Jemaah Islamiyah and says were part of a plot to blow up the American, Australian,
British and Israeli Embassies in Singapore.
A team of Singaporean psychologists examined the men, and their findings are
included in the government report. The report said that these men "were not ignorant,
destitute or disenfranchised outcasts," and that they had "average or above-average
intelligence."
Copyright © 2002 The New York Times Company.
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