BUSTED: Samudra's confession paints a scary picture
When Indonesia's police started cracking the case of last October's deadly Bali bombings, they quickly identified two Islamic militants as playing central roles in the planning and execution. One was a 42-year-old village preacher named Ali Ghufron, also known as Mukhlas, who recruited two of his brothers to help assemble and transport the bombs that killed 193 people. The other was Imam Samudra, 33, a man who spent most of his adult life as a professional militant and was described as the mastermind of the plot. Within weeks, the police managed to apprehend both men. Mukhlas fought back with a sword and scissors before being subdued. Samudra surrendered quietly.
Police now have confessions from both men. TIME has seen the confidential documents. They provide startling revelations about the scale and complexity of the Bali conspiracy, and about the fervor and reach of the people behind it. The confessions help establish for the first time a link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the Bali bombers, most of whom belong to Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a Southeast Asian network of Islamic militants. Regional security and intelligence agencies have long suspected that al-Qaeda and JI are connected, but until now, they had no verification from JI operatives themselves. The confessions show, too, the surprising depth of JI's roots in Indonesia and describe the leadership role played in the group by one of the country's most charismatic Islamic clerics, Abubakar Ba'asyir.
The confessions also offer a chilling insight into the shadowy, closed universe of Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia—a world in which grimly dedicated, self-proclaimed warriors fight in an apocalyptic global struggle that pits Muslims against what Samudra calls "the international crusade" carried out by the U.S. and its allies. As a senior Western diplomat in Jakarta puts it, the Indonesian investigators "have turned up a JI organization that is probably more intricate and more deeply embedded in Indonesian society than perhaps they or we even thought."
That's an unsettling realization even as the Indonesian authorities continue to prosecute the investigation with an intensity that few outsiders had expected. Last week the second of Mukhlas' brothers, Ali Imron, was arrested (another brother, Amrozi, was the first of the siblings to be detained), along with 12 other Indonesians on the East Kalimantan island of Berukang. That brings the tally of Bali suspects in custody to 17. An interrogation of Imron also led quickly to a raid on the home of an Islamic cleric in central Java, where a cache of weapons and explosives was seized. The rapid progress the authorities are making is commendable, but as the confessions by Mukhlas and Samudra indicate, solving the Bali case alone is not going to end Indonesia's—or Southeast Asia's—terror threat.
