The Star [Malaysia], Saturday, January 18, 2003
Westerners trained in al-Qaida training camp in Indonesia
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Seven Western men were among 50 Indonesians who
trained in military camps organized and funded by al-Qaida in 2001 on the central
Indonesian island of Sulawesi, an intelligence official said.
Muchyar Yara, a senior intelligence official, said Friday al-Qaida provided an
unspecified amount of money, along with weapons and explosives expertise, for at
least 10 camps in the jungles near Poso in Central Sulawesi province.
The camps operated between March and November 2001, he said.
He said each camp had two or three trainers, one of whom was the son-in-law of the
late Indonesian Abdullah Sunkar, the alleged founder of Jemaah Islamiyah.
The al-Qaida-linked group is believed to be behind the Oct. 12 Bali bombings which
killed at least 192 people, most of them foreign tourists.
"Al-Qaida funded and provided weapons for these camps,'' he told The Associated
Press.
"The instructors were experts in the use of explosives and weapons,'' he said,
declining to speculate where the trainers came from.
Yara said the seven Westerners trained at one of the camps, but he could not say
where they were from. He denied telling the Australian newspaper, The Age, that he
had identified one of the men as Australian cab driver Jack Thomas.
"We don't know the nationalities of the Westerners,'' Yara said.
Thomas, a 29-year-old Muslim convert from the southern Australian city of Melbourne,
was arrested in Pakistan on Jan. 4. He is being held there on suspicion of terror links.
In December 2001, Indonesia's Intelligence Chief Lt. Gen. Abdullah Hendropriyono
claimed that al-Qaida had operated training camps in Sulawesi, but he quickly
retracted the claim after the police and the military denied the existence of such
camps.
Last month, police in South Sulawesi said they had discovered three abandoned
training camps where the alleged perpetrators of a deadly bombing of a McDonald's
restaurant in December in Makassar, the provincial capital, trained for the attack. - AP
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