World News – AU – Indonesia captures militants in connection with Bali bombings

Zulkarnaen is a key member of the Jemaah Islamiyah network, which aims to build an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia

Relatives mourn before the bomb attack in Bali on Jan.. Anniversary of the attack in Kuta, Bali

Indonesian police have arrested the alleged leader of the al-Qaeda-affiliated extremist group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings and other deadly attacks.

Aris Sumarsono, also known as Zulkarnaen, is a key member of the Jemaah Islamiyah network, which aims to build an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia.

After he had evaded capture since 2003, he was arrested by police forces on Thursday in a raid on a house in Lampung on the island of Sumatra, according to police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan.

Zulkarnaen is suspected of building bombs that exploded in a number of attacks, including the October 2002 attack on Bali that killed 202 people and the August 2003 attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta who killed 12 people.

While two of his colleagues were executed in the 2008 bombings in Bali, Zulkarnaen disappeared and has been on the country’s most wanted list ever since.

« He is in custody and is being questioned by investigators, » Ramadhan said of Zulkarnaen, adding that police were evicted after questioning several suspected militants arrested last month.

Mr Ramadhan said Zulkarnaen was also accused of harboring Upik Lawanga, another bomb maker and a key member of Jemaah Islamiyah.

Lawanga was arrested in Lampung last week on suspicion of killing more than 20 people in a market on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic militancy.

The Jemaah Islamiyah group was founded in Malaysia in the 1980s by a group of exiled Indonesian militants. The group carried out ethnic and religious violence in the islands of Sulawesi and Maluku between 1998 and 2002, in which thousands died.

Because of his involvement in the group, Zulkarnaen has been on an Al Qaeda sanctions list drawn up by the UN Security Council since May 2005. The council said Zulkarnaen was one of the representatives of al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia and one of the few people in Indonesia who had been in direct contact with bin Laden’s network.

After his predecessor, Encep Nurjaman, was arrested in Thailand in 2003, he became the operations director for Jemaah Islamiyah.

During the following decade, Indonesian security forces, supported by Australia and the US, weakened the Jemaah Islamiyah network, killing leaders and arresting hundreds of militants.

However, in recent years a new threat has emerged from sympathizers of the Islamic State Group, many of whom have traveled to the Middle East to fight Isis.

Relatives mourn before the bomb attack in Bali on Jan.. Anniversary of the attack in Kuta, Bali

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Indonesia, Bali Bombings 2002, Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesian National Police, Terrorism