1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Despite the semantic disagreement, there's little doubt that Malaysia is cooperating with the U.S. in seeking to apprehend militants. Although Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is known to rail against U.S. policy in the Middle East and its conduct of the war in Afghanistan, he has long warned of the threat of radical Islam. Malaysian police made their first arrests—of 12 KMM members—in early August 2001, well before last year's attacks, at the time raising a chorus of complaints from human rights advocates who said the arrests were politically motivated to stamp out opposition.

That tough antiterrorist line has continued. Since September, as part of the global crackdown on extremist Islamic groups, Malaysian police have arrested some 50 alleged members of the KMM, which they say sought the violent overthrow of the government for the purposes of installing a fundamentalist Islamic administration. Despite the arrests, as the Malaysian official notes, even with new, stringent surveillance of visitors and tightened-up immigration checks, it's nearly impossible to track what he estimates are "several hundred" al-Qaeda-linked businessmen, bankers, traders and tourists—many of them Arab—who pass through or live in the country.

"Let's draw parallels with, say, the Tamils and LTTE," another official explains, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been waging a bloody campaign for two decades for an independent state in Sri Lanka. "If Tamils set up businesses in Sri Lanka and then support the Tamil Tigers, what can the Sri Lankan government do? It can only monitor these businessmen but cannot arrest them without concrete proof. It's the same here. Al-Qaeda representatives are sent to ensure the radical groups in the region have the necessary funding to buy arms and don't have to worry about other logistics. You must always remember that Osama's main aim is to see powerful radical groups emerging."

Police in Malaysia say they now have a clear picture of how al-Qaeda managed to reprogram just such a radical group. The Malaysian authorities had been tracking the KMM for months before they moved to arrest the 12 alleged ringleaders under suspicion of a rash of crimes, including a bank robbery that left several members dead, a political assassination and bombings of temples and churches.

The KMM, which official sources allege was founded and led by the son of opposition leader Nik Aziz, had established branches in all nine states in peninsular Malaysia. KMM members were told that the group was conducting militia-style training to protect Nik Aziz's fundamentalist Islamic Party of Malaysia in the event of a government crackdown. But top KMM leaders were actively planning the violent overthrow of the country's government in favor of an Islamic regime, police say.

In the mid-'90s, that domestic focus changed with the appearance in Malaysia of two Indonesian ulema, or Islamic teachers. The two men, Abubakar Ba'asyir and Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, preached a radical new vision of Islam, heavily influenced by the worldview of Osama bin Laden, a man Hambali claimed to have met personally on two occasions. The militant clerics found a receptive audience among many KMM members, government officials say, focusing their attention on a KMM branch in the state of Selangor, outside the capital Kuala Lumpur.

With Abubakar acting as the spiritual leader and controller of the purse strings and Hambali responsible for most of the planning and day-to-day administration, the two men wooed KMM members in Selangor and elsewhere into a new organization they established in the late 1990s, called the Jemaah Islamiah. Abubakar hammered home the themes he still preaches at his school in central Java today: the glory of a martyr's death and the overriding goal of setting up a Muslim government. Officials say he espoused the formation of a new Islamic state encompassing Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Singapore and Brunei. To fund such an ambitious vision, he was in contact with al-Qaeda paymasters and responsible for funneling money through branches of some Middle Eastern banks in Malaysia to his own newly founded cells of Jemaah Islamiah, which gradually stretched through peninsular Malaysia to Singapore, as well as to other Islamic groups in the region.

MORE >>