Word: asyir
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After the horrific bombings in Bali, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri seemed finally to grasp the seriousness of the national crisis. She rushed to the scene of the tragedy, pushed through a tough anti-terror presidential decree and permitted the arrest of Abubakar Ba'asyir, the Muslim cleric suspected of being the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, which the U.S. has dubbed a terrorist organization. Indonesia was the slowest country in Southeast Asia to respond to terrorism post-Sept. 11?Xand Bali showed graphically the need to intensify its vigilance. It seemed at last that Megawati was waking up. After...
...meetings with Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri since early September, Administration officials have informed her that the U.S. had evidence that al-Qaeda had established a major presence in Indonesia. They pressed her to arrest Islamic militants they believed were linked to Osama bin Laden's network, including Abubakar Ba'asyir, the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, a radical Islamic group suspected of terrorist attacks across the region. Two days before the bombings, U.S. Ambassador Ralph Boyce told Megawati that if she did not begin cracking down, the U.S. would close its embassy, which might drain Indonesia of American investment...
...took one awful night in Bali for the message to get through. The Megawati government last week acknowledged that al-Qaeda is active on Indonesian soil, granted intelligence authorities the power to interrogate suspected terrorists without proof of wrongdoing and finally placed Ba'asyir under arrest. But the Bali attacks suggest it may be too late to prevent al-Qaeda from making the vast Indonesian archipelago a new sanctuary. "We've been talking with them for a long time about the seriousness of the problem," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Indonesia, told TIME. "There...
...Faruq, a senior al-Qaeda operative arrested in Bogor, Indonesia, in June, confessed to U.S. investigators his involvement in a string of planned terrorist attacks in the region. According to a cia account of the interview, first disclosed by TIME last month, al-Faruq said Jemaah Islamiah's Ba'asyir had conspired in several of the plots and had ordered his followers to cooperate with al-Qaeda. (Ba'asyir has long denied any connection to terrorism, and is suing TIME over its report.) In mid-September, after phoning Megawati to discuss the threats detailed by al-Faruq, President Bush sent...
After a tearful visit to the bombing site in Bali, Megawati soon displayed a newfound steeliness, rushing through an emergency presidential decree mandating tough antiterrorism regulations. Indonesian police ordered Ba'asyir to appear for questioning not in connection with the Bali attacks but for a spate of church bombings in 2000. But first, after giving a news conference in which he said "the Americans and Jews are terrorists," Ba'asyir collapsed and was hospitalized; the next day Indonesian police put him under arrest in the hospital. Signing on at last to the war on terrorism could cost Megawati support from...