September 5, 2009:
The many documents police have seized while searching for those responsible for the July 17 terrorist bombings, have revealed other planned attacks. One involved using a technician working for an Indonesian airline, who would apparently help get bombs aboard aircraft. The suspect, Syahrir, seems to have suspected the police were on to him, and has disappeared. One of the men killed in a shootout last month (when the police believed they had cornered terrorist leader Noordin Top), was the brother-in-law of Syahrir.
Islamic terrorists are paying a high price for the July 17th bombings. Police have made dozens of arrests, and killed several key terrorist operatives (who opened fire when the police came after them.) Much carefully hidden terrorist infrastructure has been destroyed. Operatives who took years to recruit and train are now dead or in prison. Most importantly, the politicians and police have gotten a reality check. They had mistaken an absence of terrorist attacks with an absence of terrorist activity. Always ready to ease off on Islamic radicals (Indonesia is a pretty tolerant place), to avoid more Islamic conservative protests and demonstrations, the politicians now realize that the hard core Islamic radicals are implacable, and will not give up on their murderous goals. The police can now go after people who were, before July 17th, considered low grade suspects (hardly worth the effort to watch). Now these guys are being rounded up, and many are found to be dirty (talkative about terrorist activities, and possessing documents and other incriminating evidence). The terrorists have gotten sloppy as well.
In the Philippines, police are trying to find out who was behind the attempt to smuggle fifty Indonesian made SS1-V1 assault rifles into their country recently. The SS1s are made for military use only. The ship (the Captain Ufuk, registered in Panama) had come from Turkey, with a largely Georgian crew, and stopped in Indonesia before arriving at a Filipino port. There, it was searched by port police and the illegal cargo found. The rifles are worth several thousand dollars each on the black market, and it's unclear if the Philippines was the final destination for the weapons. The only thing certain is that the weapons were illegally moved out of Indonesia. This sort of thing has happened before, with Indonesia infamous as a source of weapons for arms smugglers.
August 25, 2009: Police arrested Mohamed Jibril Abdurahman, son of an Islamic radical cleric, as a suspect in the July 17bombings. Abdurahman runs a pro-terrorist web site and calls himself the "Prince of Jihad." He is suspected of playing a role in providing money to the terrorists.
August 18, 2009: Police arrested two men believed to be involved in financing the July terrorist attacks. One man, Iwan Herdiansyah, owned an Internet café in West Java and had lived in Saudi Arabia for several years (only returning to Indonesia last year). The other suspect, an Arab man (Ali Mohammad Abdillah), is believed to have received several large cash transfers from Yemen recently.
August 15, 2009: For the second time in a week, someone has fired on a bus carrying workers to the huge Freeport mine complex in Papua. Last month, 22 people were arrested for an earlier spate of shootings. Police are still trying to figure out if the violence is caused by separatists, or disputes within the mine work force.
August 11, 2009: DNA tests revealed that the man killed at a terrorist hideout last week was not most-wanted terrorist leader Noordin Mohammad Top. The dead man was Ibrohim, a florist who used his job to smuggle explosives, hidden in flowers, into the hotels bombed last July. Ibrohim appears to be the suspected "inside man" for the July attacks. Top is still seen as the planner and financier for the operation.